3.3 percent, from 48.3 to 46.7, and the average writing-skills score dropped an even steeper 6.9 percent, from 49.2 to 45.8.2 Scores on the verbal sections of the SAT tests given to college-bound students have also been dropping. A 2007 report from the U.S. Department of Education showed that twelfth-graders’ scores on tests of three different kinds of reading—for performing a task, for gathering information, and for literary experience—fell between 1992 and 2005. Literary reading aptitude suffered the largest decline, dropping twelve percent.3
