From the New York Times: For some reason, that strikes me as the funniest Conquistador-American name yet that I've seen among diversity hires. I'm waiting for José Antonio Primo de Rivera y Sáenz de Heredia IV, Duke of Primo Rivera to show up on the New York Times list of its new vibrantly diverse employees,... Read More

It's widely believed that racial gaps in test scores are just class gaps. And, if that's not true, then it's assumed that race is fading away in importance relative to class. But an important study shows that in multiracial California, race is becoming more influential in recent years. THE GROWING CORRELATION BETWEEN RACE AND SAT... Read More

The traditional concept of college admissions was that the goal was to predict applicants' future achievement (which could be measured in terms of first year in college grades or money donated 50 years later or whatever). The most obvious way to predict future achievement was past achievement: e.g., high school grades. Presumably, past achievement had... Read More

Respected commenter Mitch explains what is going on with rising Asian SAT scores:Certainly, the easier reading test makes it easier for Asians to get high scores. The writing test rewards attention to detail above all&nbs

The Unsilenced Silence blog has a good graph of Asian v. white SAT scores from 1996 to 2010 in terms of gaps in standard deviations:So, like most things involving test scores, the gap was stable in the �later 1990s. However, Asians improved through much of the 2000s, especially on the Writing test, a new section... Read More

The oldest SAT score report on the College Board website is from 1996, right after the "recentering" in 1995 that raised scores about 100 points on a 400 to 1600 scale. Over the last 15 years, the average overall score on the original two-part Verbal + Math SAT (i.e., ignoring the new-fangled Writing section of... Read More

From FairTest: 2011 College-Bound Seniors Avg SAT Scores W/score changes from 2006 READING MATH WRITING TOTAL ALL 497 (-6) 514 (-4) 489 (-8) 1500 (-18) Female 495 (-7) 500 (-2) 496 (-6) 1491 (-15) Male 500 (-5) 531 (-5) 482 (-9) 1513 (-19) Asian 517 (+7) 595 (+17)

From CBS:In contrast, scores on state exams mandated by the No Child Left Behind act have gone up, UP, UP!�I wonder why? Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that the College Board and ETS don't have large material incentives to get scores up by hook or by crook. There's this concept called... Read More

From the Washington Post, here are the scores by state on the Preliminary SAT (PSAT) required to make the first cut in the National Merit Scholarship program. (To convert from the three part PSAT score to the traditional two-part SAT Math plus Verbal scores, divide by 3 and multiply by 20: e.g., Arizona requires a... Read More

Give the kids a really hard practice test when they walk in the door. Measure progress against that. From the WSJ:My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

A reader writes: On the SAT (at least when I was coaching it in the late 1980s for The Princeton Review), there were six reading comprehension passages. One of these was the "diversity" passage -- always about a woman or minority. Without even reading the passage itself, a smart person who understood how the test... Read More

A reader writes: Rudy enrolled at Bishop Loughlin Memorial High School in 1957, an exclusive Catholic prep school. They accepted two kids from each parish.From "Rudy: An Investigative Biography of Rudolph Giuliani" by Wayne Barrett on page 34: "After seven semesters at Bishop Loughlin, Rudy's grade average of 84.8 earned him a ranking of 130,... Read More