College Board Announces Scores for New SAT® with Writing Section

Females outscored males on the writing section, which consists of a multiple-choice portion and an essay. The average writing score for all was 497. Females scored an average of 502, 11 points higher than males, who scored an average of 491. A stronger female performance in writing was evident across every racial/ethnic group.

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Mathematics scores dipped by 2 points to 518, returning to the level of two years ago. Both male and female mathematics scores declined by 2 points to 536 and 502, respectively.

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Average critical reading scores decreased 5 points to 503. The critical reading score decline was more pronounced among males. Male scores declined by 8 points to 505; female scores by 3 points to 502.

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Subgroup Differences in Mathematics, Critical Reading, and Writing

ESL: Students for whom English is a second language increased 5 points in critical reading to 467 and 2 points in mathematics to 523. They scored 469 on the writing section. Although this is 28 points below the mean for all students, it is a smaller gap than these students experienced for critical reading. More ESL students took the SAT this year.

Race/Ethnicity: African American and Mexican American critical reading scores, 434 and 454 respectively, improved over last year by one point each. American Indian mathematics scores improved by 1 point to 494 and Mexican American mathematics scores improved over last year by 2 points to 465. The largest declines in critical reading were seen among White and Other Hispanic students, both down by 5 points to 527 and 458, respectively.

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Student Performance on Essay

The essay asked students to respond to a point of view on an issue through an original first-draft format and support a position with reasoning and examples taken from reading, studies, experience, or observations. Two readers scored each essay, each reader providing a score from 1 to 6 for a maximum score of 12. The average essay score was 7.2 out of 12. Reader agreement on essay scores was very high. Nearly 97 percent of readers exactly agreed on scores or differed by only one point. Only 3 percent of essays needed to be resolved by a third reader. The College Board performed analyses on 6,498 essays randomly sampled from the March 2005 through January 2006 SAT administrations. Results demonstrated that longer essays were more likely to receive higher scores; however, the relationship between length and score was only moderate (.62). Eighty-four percent of essay responses reached the second page. Half the essays used the first-person voice. Score differences were slight, with first-person-voice essays averaging a score of 6.9, compared to 7.2 for those not using first-person voice. Only 8 percent of essays were identified as using the typical five-paragraph essay structure. Fifty-three percent of essays used academic examples (historical, literary/art/music, science or technology, and current events or politics) and 52 percent of essays included some type of personal experience as supporting evidence. Some students used both types of examples.

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