Princeton, NJ being the HQ of ETS, you could call it ground zero for the notion that mass standardized test results are meaningful. As you get farther and farther from that center, as American cultures and values become more and more different from those of NJ, I would expect the test scores to also come down a bit. It geography, we would talk about that in terms of core and periphery. Hmmm.
Think you've got a correlation without causation there.
Austin, the data I found says that New Jersey's scores aren't the highest (that honor seems to go to Iowa, Wisconsin, Illinois, Michigan, and Minnesota, which all cluster together at the top. I might have missed one). Here's my
source. This is interesting:
this table in USA Today (which cites the College Board as its source) shows that the states with the highest average scores tend to have the lowest percentage of students who take the SAT. The percent-taking-the-test data seems odd to me, but it's too late to start digging into it now!
It also seems that foreign students do better than American students on math (
source). The grey box on the right says that some colleges game their scores by cutting foreign-student verbal scores while including their math scores. Don't know how reliable this article is, but I found an article in the NY Times from 1992 saying that foreign-student math scores were 57 points higher than US student math scores (
here's the article here).
