The College Board, sponsor of the SAT, has urged the high school education department to make amendments to their curriculum schedule after observing poor performances in the college admission exam.
Of more than 1.6 million college-bound high school students who sat for the SAT and graduated in 2013, only 43 percent qualified to meet the board's college and career readiness benchmark, a statistic that has remained the same since 2009.
The association has a set standard for the test takers which requires them to acquire 1550 on 2400. The level suggests that those students who successfully reach the scale have 65 percent chances of earning a first-year college GPA of a B-minus or above.
"We must dramatically increase the number of students in K-12 who are prepared for college and careers," College Board President David Coleman told US News. "Only by transforming the daily work that students do can we achieve excellence and equity."
Apart from lower success rates in the SAT exam, students' scores on individual sections also remained unchanged in the last few years. In 2013, the average reading score reduced by three points from 2009 to 496; average math scores remained constant at 514 since 2007 and the average writing score dropped four points from 2009, to 488.
"While some might see stagnant scores as no news, we at the College Board see this as a call to action," Coleman told Huffington Post.
"And we at the College Board are concerned," Coleman told NPR.
Despite majority of the statistics reflecting poor quality of the students, some improved figures were observed in the 2013 SAT exam.
Of all the SAT takers, minority students comprised of 46 percent, which is considered to be the highest percentage ever; the number of African-American students who met the target rose from 14.8 percent in 2012 to 15.6 percent in 2013 and the percentage of Hispanic students who met or exceeded the benchmark increased from 22.8 percent in 2012 to 23.5 percent.
"While certainly the flat scores are nothing to celebrate, when you dig down deeper into the data, we see a lot of encouraging news," Jim Hull, a senior policy analyst for the National School Boards Association told the post. "Our public schools are doing a much better job preparing our poor and minority students for college."
"What is encouraging is that more minority students are taking the SAT--and their scores are improving. We must sustain and build on recent gains in African American and Latino college-going and completion," Secretary of Education Arne Duncan told the Post.
