The point isn’t to make laggards look like scholars. College Board officials say they’re simply “recentering” the SAT scale to correct for decades of declining scores. When the test was established in 1941, 500 was the average score among the 10,000 kids who took it. But as the college-bound population expanded beyond a small elite to include 1.2 million people of varied backgrounds, test scores changed for the worse. Today, the average math score is 478, the average verbal score just 424. The new system will move the midpoint back to 500-making it easier to see who’s beaten the odds.
