For the second straight year, Walt Whitman High School students had the highest average combined SAT score of any high school in Montgomery County.
MCPS on Tuesday released average combined SAT scores from all Class of 2014 students in the system. With an average combined score of 1,900 (out of 2,400) Whitman’s Class of 2014 once again beat out regular top performers Poolesville (1891), Winston Churchill (1,838), Thomas S. Wootton (1,836) and Richard Montgomery (1,771).
Almost 70 percent of all MCPS students who graduated in 2014 took the SAT, the widely used college entrance exam with critical reading, math and writing sections each worth 800 points.
The MCPS Class of 2014 average was 547 for critical reading, 560 for math and 542 for writing, adding up to a combined average of 1,650 — two points higher than the Class of 2013 average.
The 1,650 countywide average is higher than the Maryland average (1,468) and national average (1,497), both of which dropped compared to 2013.
In a press release, MCPS said much of the Class of 2014 improvement was due to a six-point improvement to a combined average of 1,403 by black students and a 10-point improvement to a combined average of 1,461 by Hispanic graduates.
While both those rates are also significantly higher than the state and national averages, the Class of 2014 still showed a large achievement gap between white and minority students. White MCPS graduates scored an average of 1,766 on the test.
Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School graduates averaged 1,711, down from the Class of 2013 average of 1,760. Walter Johnson High School graduates averaged 1,747, up from the Class of 2013 average of 1,716. Walter Johnson’s Hispanic graduates who took the SAT improved by an average of 76 points compared to 2013.
