STUDENT CHANGE, PROGRAM CHANGE: WHY THE SAT SCORES KEPT FALLING

The first leg of the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) score decline occurred mainly in the 1960s. It seemed to be explained fairly satisfactorily by the evidence that the composition of the test‐taking group had changed to include a larger proportion of students with relatively low‐developed ability, mirroring the increased holding power of education for teenagers. In studies made during the 1970s, no comparable underlying change was found to explain the second (mainly 1970s) segment of the decline, which was ascribed instead to a complex of factors—“pervasive influences”—in both school and society. In this study, the importance of pervasive societal influences on student learning is not in dispute. A variety of data suggests, however, that the increase in school retention rates of poorly prepared students and the resulting heterogeneity of the senior high school population is a unifying explanatory variable for the second leg of the decline as well as the first. The argument is that several of the “pervasive influences” invoked to explain the continuation of the decline in the 1970s are best understood as adaptive responses of the schools to the appearance of a greater diversity of students in senior high school. These responses, which in combination represent a reduction in the demand level of the school program, included grade inflation, proliferation of electives, textbook simplification, and reduction in homework assignments. Students also chose fewer academic and more vocational and general courses. It is hypothesized that the continuation of the decline in the 1970s was, in substantial part, the direct consequence of those school‐related changes and thus was a delayed, indirect consequence of the compositional shift. The two declines seem to have been reciprocal rather than unrelated. Student changes begat program changes, and each new condition in its turn led to lower scores. The paradigm helps to explain why high scores became scarcer in the 1970s, why the scores of students with high class rank continued to drop while those of students with lower class standing stabilized or turned up, and why the pervasive factors seemed to affect only the senior high school students. This report suggests that the academic demand level of the schools probably stopped falling in the late 1970s, that 1980 marked a significant turning point, and that the recent slight upturn in SAT scores marks the beginning of a positive trend rather than a pause before a continuation of the drop.