School officials said they are weighing several options, including encouraging more non-honors or non-AP students to enroll in Algebra II by sophomore year instead of participating in an easier, two-year Algebra I course; financing the PSAT for sophomores and perhaps freshmen; and, on a more basic level, adding more testing sites within the county so that students can take the exam in a comfortable setting without having to commute long distances.
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When I read that a school/district/county/state/whatever reports education improving but SAT scores not improving, I wonder if this has to do with the fact that the new version of the SAT (which launched a year ago) requires a timed handwritten essay. Students get 25 minutes to write two pages, which graders have two minutes to decipher. Graders can’t give points for illegible material (when a student doesn’t know how to keep his/her handwriting legible at speed) and they can’t give points for material not written (when a student writes legibly but too slowly to pen more than a paragraph in the time allotted).
The essay counts for several hundred points, and most high-schoolers nationally have extremely poor (slow and/or illegible) handwriting. Yet nothing in the article suggests that Prince William Country has even considered looking at whether its high-schoolers’ handwriting might need a boost to bring up those SAT scores.