Almost No Blacks Among the Top Scorers on the SAT Test

Most students hoping to qualify for admission to any of the nation’s 25 highest-ranked universities and 25 highest-ranked liberal arts colleges need to score at least 700 on each portion of the SAT.

For admission to the very highest ranked, brand-name schools such as Princeton or MIT, most applicants need scores of 750 to be considered for admission. In many cases, black students who win admission to these institutions have mean SAT scores 15 percent or more below the mean for white students who are admitted.

In 2007, 158,536 African Americans took the SAT test. They made up 11 percent of all SAT test takers. But only 910 African-American college-bound students scored 700 or above on the math SAT and only 1,176 scored at least 700 on the verbal SAT. Nationally, more than 89,000 students of all races scored 700 or above on the math SAT and nearly 75,000 students scored 700 or above on the verbal SAT. Thus, in this top-scoring category of all SAT test takers, blacks made up only 1 percent of the students scoring 700 or higher on the math test and only 1.6 percent of the students scoring 700 or higher on the verbal SAT.

If the nation’s leading colleges and universities were to abandon their race-sensitive admissions programs, it is likely that black enrollments would plummet because African Americans make up only 1 or 2 percent of the top-performing group of students who take the SAT college entrance examination.

Copyright © 2007. The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education. All rights reserved.