The College Board’s 2013 SAT Report on College & Career Readiness reveals that only 43 percent of SAT takers in the class of 2013 met the SAT College and Career Readiness Benchmark.
If we generalize the population of SAT test takers as those students with college aspirations, it's a question worth asking... why are the majority of students who are interested in attending college not fully prepared?
Excellent question! I was wondering about this myself. Several factors may be at play:
1) Some students may not have been internally motivated/driven to press for college... but others may have wanted them to sit for the SAT. For example: their high school which previously was ranked based on achieving high standardized test scores, therefore encouraged only its best and brightest to sit for the exams... is now being rated on increasing accessibility to standardized tests, therefore encouraging all students to sit for exams.
2) If I recall, the organization's definition of college-ready is: anticipated B and above in all college-level courses. Therefore someone who may achieve a C in a college-level course, and someone who may take a prep-level math or English course as a college freshman... would each be considered not-college-ready.
Last year alone, more than 300,000 students in the
graduating class of 2012 who had been identified as having the potential to succeed in an AP course did not take one.
It's easy to see the dollar signs from The College Board's perspective here, because that's a lot of potential customers that never walked in the door.
But it does seem to be a problem, too. If all of these students were identified as capable of AP work, and assuming the classes were available, why didn't they take them?
I've previously seen this ascribed to the fixed mindset: students and their families deciding to forego rigor for the probable higher GPA of an easier course. To offset this and provide incentive to take rigorous courses, some high schools may have weighted grades for selected Honors and/or AP courses.
