(Source: UC Santa Cruz)

You remember the SAT's. The number two pencils, the beads of blood forming on the forehead, the anxiety, the feeling that your entire life hinges on this one instrument of torture.

Yeah, that test.

Well, the SAT has received some bad press lately over the scoring snafu. Now it's in the news again because scores are dropping. So what?

Consider:

Some colleges are reporting double-digit drops in the average SAT scores of applicants this year, even as other credentials, such as class rank and college-prep coursework, remained similar to or grew stronger than last year's.

Among schools reporting large drops: The nine-campus University of California system, which saw a 15-point drop on average among applicants, Average composite scores for the ACT, a rival college entrance exam, were unchanged from last year.

It's not yet clear what the drops mean, but colleges are particularly curious because the scores are almost completely based on the new SAT, introduced last year by the non-profit college board, which owns the test. [....]

No one has suggested that the declines are related to a scoring fiasco this year in which thousands of SAT scores were underreported. That has led to a lawsuit and prompted a New York state senator to consider new testing legislation.

The new wrinkle is reviving debate about the latest version of the SAT. That is "further undermining the credibility of the College Board at a time when they are very much on the defensive," says Bob Schaeffer, spokesman for FairTest, a non-profit testing critic in Cambridge, Mass.

Read the rest here.