Colorado will temporarily lower SAT math score needed for graduation, while investigating a long-term plan

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Colorado students for the next two years will be able to meet state graduation requirements with a lower score on the SAT math test.

The State Board of Education voted in favor of the temporary change on Wednesday. Staff from the Colorado Department of Education and many board members said the change isn’t a lowering of standards, but rather a response to changes to the SAT that seem to have been more significant than expected.

“I want to make sure we’re not negatively impacting Colorado students given we had some unusual results — not just in Colorado, but across the country,” said board President Rebecca McClellan.

In past years, students needed a 500 on the math portion to be able to use the math SAT test to meet graduation requirements. Wednesday’s vote will change the score to 480 for students graduating in 2024-25 and 2025-26.

The percentage of 11th graders who scored 500 on the math test dropped from 45% in 2023 to 39% in 2024. With the new score of 480, about 45.5% of the students who took the test in spring 2024 will be able to use the score to meet their graduation requirements in spring 2025, making the percentage comparable to past years.

The concern was that some students may have planned to use their scores from their SAT to meet graduation requirements, and may have unexpectedly gotten lower scores than expected based on taking the PSAT in their ninth and 10th grades. Those students, now as seniors, may have a smaller time frame to find an alternative way to meet state graduation requirements before May.

There were several changes to the SAT test last spring , including a new fully digital format and question and language changes. Joyce Zurkowski, the state department’s chief assessment officer, told the board there is some investigation into whether the questions on this year’s SAT were ultimately more advanced.

In Colorado, all 11th graders take the SAT, and students who meet a certain score can use that score to meet Colorado’s graduation requirement to show competency in math and English. Districts can offer students about a dozen ways to meet that requirement, such as taking advanced courses, concurrent enrollment classes, or industry certificates. While state officials don’t track how many students use each method, they believe the SAT is one of the more popular options.

Using the raw SAT scores, the state of Colorado also calculates how many students met state expectations in math and English language arts. The percentage of Colorado students meeting state expectations on the SAT math test dropped by 4.1 percentage points compared to last year. Similar drops were not seen in the English language arts portion of the test and so the state’s changes to the graduation cut scores are only for the math test.

Colorado PSAT and SAT 2024 scores: How did your school or district perform?

At the same time, the state will be working with higher education partners to identify what scores on this reformatted SAT actually correlate to postsecondary readiness to recommend the best passing score for the graduation requirement to use long-term.

State Board member Steve Durham said he was already inclined to think that changing the score was appropriate based on last month’s board discussion, but since then he got additional information about the other states that use the SAT for all 11th graders, including Connecticut, Indiana , Michigan , and West Virginia. He said he saw that they too reported similar significant decreases in the number of students meeting math expectations.

“Data now confirms the most likely reason for the difference in the outcome is due to a change in the test rather than a change in student performance,” Durham said. “Re-norming it for this purpose, at least for graduation, for a short period of time, is an appropriate thing to do.”

Yesenia Robles is a reporter for Chalkbeat Colorado covering K-12 school districts and multilingual education. Contact Yesenia at yrobles@chalkbeat.org .