College Board Proposes Strategic Initiatives to Improve SAT Scores

College Board recently discussed Three Areas of Strategic Challenge for their testing program – strategic initiatives policymakers and College Board can use to help improve student test taker participation and performance. The topic is one part of the larger body of information on the 2015 College Board Program Results that is featured on their website.

The three strategic initiatives are SAT School Day, AP Credit Policy, and AP Stem. Each topic is broken down into sections titled Innovation, Benefits, Impact, and Conclusion. Listed below is a summarized version of the information at a glance.

• The concept of SAT School Day is to integrate SAT testing into the school day. To the present day, SAT testing is often conducted in testing centers at times outside of the school schedule such as weekends. If SAT test preparation and administration becomes more fully incorporated classroom time, positive benefits could be that more students understand the value of the test and have access to it, and complete it and improve their performance.

• The AP Credit Policy is an idea to grant college credit for the completion of Advanced Placement courses in high school. A positive impact is that more students may sign up for AP courses, which could also help them gain admission into colleges and improve their performance once there.

• AP STEM refers to the need to prepare more students for careers in critical professions in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. To meet this need, the AP program has now expanded to offer more courses and opportunities to prepare for STEM careers.

Socrato is a website for scoring and performance reports for standardized admissions test preparation. Socrato reports are available for the SAT, ACT, PSAT, SSAT, HSPT, and many more tests. You can learn more or try for free at socrato.com. Featured image credit: Sean MacEntee