2024 SAT Data Drop

The College Board has just released the latest SAT data. Here's a review.

Today the College Board dropped this year’s SAT results, and that means it’s time to get a refresher on the state of the gaps!

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Table of Contents

• National Results

  • By Race

  • By Sex

• Representative State Results

  • By Race

  • By Sex

• Comparing With Previous Years

  • Overall

  • Michigan

  • Hawaiian Selection

• What About the ACT?

• The Composition of Tomorrow’s Elites and Underclasses

• Methods and Additional Charts

• Have Suggestions?

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National Results

At the national level, the score distributions within certain ranges were like so in 2023:

In 2024, the ranges updated to the following:

There’s a lot going on here, but the first thing I would note is that scores are largely stable. There are some differences, but not many are worth noting. So with the data shown, let’s get to using it.

Race

Because I received so many confused comments last year, I’m also going to set Whites to the baseline for this graph and assume they have a mean of 100 with an SD of 15 and that gaps can be computed from d accordingly. I have added the multiracial group to the charts this year, even though I chose to omit them because it’s not clear what they are last year. I’ll note that it is still unclear what they are, but here’s the data anyway.

Results are consistent between years, with most differences being within the range of expectations from sampling error. The exceptions are Amerindians and Asians, who, respectively, got much worse and much better relative to Whites. Why? I assume this reflects the continuing trend towards elite Asians selecting into SAT test-taking and elite Amerindians selecting out, rather than genuine population changes.

In terms of variances, the results are very similar to last year and changes are entirely consistent with sampling error. For example, if Whites had a standard deviation of 15 last year, Amerindians, Asians, Blacks, Hispanics, Hawaiians, and the Multiracial had standard deviations of 15.23, 17.30, 15.27, 15.75, 15.84, and 16.22, which updated this year to 14.56, 17.48, 15.27, 15.56, 15.34, and 16.54.¹

To put these race differences in means and standard deviations into perspective, here’s a graph of the data. A version scaled by population size is provided in the section entitled Methods and Additional Charts.

Sex

The sex difference in scores was meager last year and remains meager this year, with changes attributable entirely to sampling error. In 2023, the male advantage was equivalent to 0.62 IQ points (0.041 d) and in 2024, it’s 0.74 IQ points (0.049 d). The main difference by sex is down to the variances, which are considerably differentiated. Last year, the female standard deviation was 12.89 if the male one was 15, and this year, it’s 13.11.

To put sex differences into perspective, here’s a graph of the data, alongside the results for Michigan, which is a state that seated 97% of eligible test-takers last year and 96% this year. In Michigan, the sex differences were 1.38 and 1.08 points in favor of women in 2023 and 2024, respectively, with female standard deviations of 13.10 and 13.05 in the same years.

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Representative State Results

National-level results are, of course, subject to potentially substantial sampling bias because of the selectiveness of testing, which varies year-to-year. For that reason, this section goes into the results for particular states that have universal testing, because those states can be expected to have more stable, less selection-biased results, and thus results that are thus more interpretable between years.

For this analysis, we’ll do what we did above, but show results for Michigan, because the results from there should be less polluted by sampling error given 97% of eligible high schoolers took the SAT in 2023 and 96% took it in 2024. But first, here are their score distributions for 2023:

And here are their distributions for 2024:

Race

The chart below illustrates some notable differences between the scores in Michigan and the scores at the national level.