Ruth bats .350, Jackson trails again, averaging .340. The batting champ trophy goes to Jackson. Not at all. Jackson had 100, then 150. If you do the numbers, you'll find that for the season as a whole, Ruth batted .314, Jackson .316.
Averages often defy ordinary intuition.
That's the story behind average SAT scores, too. What has changed is not student performance but demographics. Minority students, whose scores are rising faster, but from a lower base, are showing up in test rooms in higher numbers than they used to. Kendrick Frazier provides a summary in the Fall 1993 issue of the Skeptical Inquirer. The full study, Perspectives on Education in America, was conducted by Sandia National Laboratories and is written up in the May-June 1993 issue of the Journal of Educational Research.