Washington

The College Board released the profile of the 1998 college freshmen who took SAT and AP (Advanced Placement) exams, saying that the number of well-prepared students of all ethnicities is increasing -- as well as the number of poorly prepared students.

The stark contrast led Dr. Donald Stewart, head of the College Board, to decry the "widening gap in preparation."

More than one million of today's freshmen took the SAT and they took more than one million AP tests, so the data collected from those students allows an intimate look at the high school preparation of a huge cohort of students. The SAT and AP are used by many of the selective colleges in the country as a way to sort through applications for admissions.

Almost 20 percent more African Americans took the SAT in 1998 than in 1988 -- and the number of Mexican Americans almost doubled during those ten years. But while there was a slight rise in the average math scores for population as a whole, for those two groups.

Although The College Board cautions against using its data as a surrogate for school accountability, the SAT is widely used as a measure of school performance, and average scores are eagerly studied to give some idea of where the nation stands educationally.

The most striking differences the College Board found in average SAT scores was between suburban schools and schools in both urban and rural areas. Suburban schools logged in average scores that were 15 to 20 twenty points above the average, whereas urban and rural schools had average scores that were between 9 and 17 points below the average.

According to College Board data, between 40 and 50 percent of African American and Hispanic Americans who take the SAT are clustered in the urban and rural schools.

This gap is also reflected in the schools that offer AP exams which are now offered in more than 50 percent of all high schools. However, those high schools tend to be either in the suburbs or urban magnet schools, rather than in rural areas or run-of-the-mill urban schools that serve many African American and Hispanic students.