‘Pandemic disruptions’: SAT results for 2021 are out. Did Idaho students meet benchmarks?
The share of Idaho students meeting both the reading and math benchmarks on the SAT dropped this year compared to 2019, according to data released by the State Department of Education.
Of the 19,713 high school juniors who took the college entrance exam in the spring of 2021, 29.1% met both the math and evidence-based reading and writing benchmarks, a drop of about 1.7 percentage points from 2019.
For the reading and writing section, 53.2% met the benchmark, a drop of 3 percentage points from 2019. Only 31.2% met the math benchmark, a decrease of 1.3 percentage points from 2019.
Teachers and administrators were expecting students to score lower on standardized tests after a challenging year of navigating remote, hybrid and in-person learning during the COVID-19 pandemic. But SAT scores also have been dropping in the state for several years — the average statewide score was 999 in 2016 and dropped to 976 in 2019.
“We expected there would be learning loss because of pandemic disruptions in the school year and in the previous spring, so it isn’t surprising that the percentage of students meeting benchmarks went down from 2019 – the last time Idaho 11th graders took the SAT,” Superintendent of Public Instruction Sherri Ybarra said in a statement.
“Many of our high school students weren’t back in the classroom full-time until spring, a few weeks before they took the test.”
Disparities in scores were noticeable and significant for minority students compared to white students, according to the data. Among white students, 33.6% met both benchmarks for the SAT. Only 12.1% of Black students and 10.8% of Hispanic students met both.
Less than 10% of students who identified as homeless met both benchmarks, and about 15% of economically disadvantaged students did.
The percentage of students meeting both benchmarks varied widely across districts. In the Boise School District, nearly 42% met both; in the neighboring West Ada district, the state’s largest, about 36% did; and in the Nampa School District, only 18.1% did.
High school students in Idaho are required to take the SAT, a college admissions exam, to graduate, and the test is offered to juniors for free. But they might no longer need to submit their scores when applying to in-state schools. Last month, the Idaho State Board of Education moved to remove the minimum requirement that students need an entrance exam, such as the SAT or ACT, for admission to one of the state’s four-year institutions.
Colleges and universities still may mandate the exam, but the move to remove the requirement gave the institutions more flexibility to use other measures. During the State Board meeting last month, Chief Academic Officer TJ Bliss said there had been a “growing body of research suggesting that college entrance exam scores don’t predict success and that GPA and other factors are more important.”
The State Board had previously waived the requirement because of the pandemic. The move in 2020 came as a growing number of colleges and universities continued to move away from requiring the exams for admission.
The SAT results weren’t the only ones recently that showed a drop in the share of students meeting certain benchmarks. Results from the Idaho Reading Indicator showed a lower percentage of students reading at grade level in the spring of this year, when compared to 2019.
The IRI showed that about 65.1% of students in kindergarten through third grade were reading at grade level at the end of the 2021 academic year. In 2019, about 69.7% of students in those grades were reading at grade level.
