Average national reading scores on the SAT college entrance exam fell to the lowest level in four decades and only 43 percent of 2012 high school seniors who took the test showed they were fully prepared for college, according to new data released on Monday.
College-bound seniors scored an average of 496 points in reading, down one point from 2011 and a 34-point drop since 1972, the College Board, which administers the SAT test, said in a report.
As a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Maryland, I see this every day. I just finished teaching a course on Religion and Politics over the summer. At least four of my students in a class of twenty needed only my class to graduate. Yet the papers, they wrote consistently demonstrated that they could not construct a grammatically correct English sentence, nor did they put much real effort into learning the content of the course. Likewise, they chided me for not allowing them to express their “opinions” in papers instead of constructing arguments based on the content of the literature we read in the course. In the end, as an untenured graduate student, I was essential told that I had to pass them. Somehow, these four made it through their entire college career and never learned how to write.