Graduating seniors at Department of Defense Education Activity schools last year outscored the nation in critical reading and writing on the SAT and closed the gap in math, according to 2016 results released Friday by DODEA. ()
NOTE: This story has been updated and corrected to reflect that the average score for DODEA students was 1,511 out of 2,400 points.
Graduating seniors at military-run schools last year outscored the nation in critical reading and writing on the SAT and closed the gap in math, according to 2016 results released Friday by the Department of Defense Education Activity.
The strong showing by DODEA students in the verbal portions of the SAT pushed DODEA’s average combined score above that of the nation, despite falling short of the national average in math by 2 points.
On a 2,400-point scale, DODEA’s combined SAT average was 1,511. Students improved in all subject areas, pushing the military school system to its highest combined average score on the SAT in the past five years.
In critical reading, DODEA’s average was 516 — 20 points above the nation’s — and its 489 in writing was 7 points above the national average.
In math — a curricular area that DODEA has targeted for improvement — DODEA’s average score of 506 continued to creep upward, gaining 5 points from 2015 but still below the national average of 508.
DODEA’s results, “particularly the gain in reading and mathematics, reflect the excellent and dedicated work by our educators around the world and indicate our focus on more rigorous and relevant College and Career Ready Standards is a step in the right direction,” DODEA Director Thomas M. Brady said in a news release.
DODEA is rolling out new standards modeled closely after the Common Core standards, a set of guidelines, adopted by a number of U.S. states, for what pre-kindergarten-through-12th-grade students should know. But DODEA students who took the SAT last year may not yet have been taught to those new standards.
This year’s data include only results for students who took the test before March 2016. That’s when the College Board released the new SAT and students began taking the test in the new format, which is now scored on a 1,600-point scale. Most of the students who graduated in 2016 took the old SAT, DODEA officials said.
Of note, DODEA’s average scores for students who identified as black or African-American far exceeded the national average in all three portions of the test, by a combined 104 points. Hispanic students in DODEA also did well compared with their ethnic peers, scoring 95 points above the national average for Hispanic students, according to DODEA.
DODEA’s female students, meanwhile, outpaced their female peers in the nation in math by 1 point, while DODEA male students fell 7 points below the national average in math.
