Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: MONDAY, June 20, 1994                   TAG: 9406270113
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A-4   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

SCORES

Does this change represent:

(a) a technical adjustment so that a verbal or math score of 500 once again will become the average?

(b) a dumbing down of the test and yet another example of eroding standards?

(c) both of the above?

The right answer, we believe, is (c).

Fifty years ago, a score of 500 may have been the average for the national test taken by college-bound students. The problem today, tellingly, is not that the scores have improved (thereby sending the actual average above 500). The scores have fallen.

The College Board, therefore, is "recalibrating" the SAT to adjust the current average verbal score of 424 and math score of 478 to make them both 500.

Voila! A better educated citizenry!

Well, not exactly.

In their defense, College Board officials and college admissions officers point out that the pool of students taking the SAT has grown over the decades. Only 10,000 students, about 60 percent of whom were white males and privately educated, took the test in 1941. These days some 1 million to 2 million students from diverse demographic and educational backgrounds take the test, causing average scores to fall.

But if it's true that more students take the test these days, it's also true that the nation needs a more highly skilled work force than it did 50 years ago. Not just for the elite, but for everyone. At a time when American skills are falling behind internationally competitive standards, why ease the curve on which SAT scores are graded?

Defenders of this adjustment also point out that the SAT is mostly valid as a predictor of how well a student will perform in college. The purpose is to help inform admissions decisions. And this will be served because, over the years, SAT scores have increasingly bunched in the middle ranges. By spreading out the distribution of scores, the new system will help admissions officers better distinguish among scores in the middle.

Maybe so. But if SATs don't provide a precise national assessment of students' skills and knowledge, they do offer a rough guide, and one way to measure performance is to judge present against past. From now on, an embarrassing asterisk will have to be added to every comparison. Worse, dumbing down the scoring will send a message to today's students that not as much is expected of them as was expected of their parents.

In fact, the country needs to expect more of today's students, and they need to demand more of themselves. A high-quality education can't be graded on a curve. At least symbolically, the College Board's decision to get, in effect, more gallons per mile by recalibrating the odometer, is the wrong answer to a question that gets tougher every year:

What is good enough?