Perhaps the most commonly cited barrier to African American students being chosen by the most competitive colleges and universities for admission into science and engineering programs is their performance on standardized college entrance exams, namely the SAT and ACT.
Indeed, the average African American SAT score is approximately 200 points lower than that of White and Asian students, according to findings cited in a recent study by Dr. Reginald Wilson of the American Council on Education. In 1996, only 4,415 African American high school students had SAT scores of 1200 or above.
According to both ACT and SAT administrators, the major reason for the gaps in standardized test scores is the difference in course loads taken by students. African American high school students tend not to take the more rigorous college preparatory math and science classes that would prepare them for standardized tests, often because they are discouraged from taking those courses.
Yet, another issue was pointed to by U.S. Secretary of Education Richard Riley in discussing the poor showing all American twelfth graders made in the latest international comparison of math and science knowledge. Riley said that 28 percent of high school math teachers and 55 percent of physics teachers nationwide have neither major nor minor credentials in these subjects. This is even more true for teachers in schools that serve mostly African American and Hispanic students, where large percentages of teachers often teach "out of license," or out of their field of academic training.
For those reasons, many programs that focus on what is known as the "pipeline" often begin with teacher education and science enrichment of middle and high schoolers.
For current high school juniors and seniors, however, scoring well on entrance exams is, for all intents and purposes, a must for entrance into the most prestigious science; math, engineering and technology (SMET) institutions. This phenomenon persists even though the SAT only claims to be a predictor of first-year grades, not of overall college success.
