From Kathryn Juric, vice president of the College Board’s SAT Program:

When it comes to education policy in the United States today, one thing is becoming increasingly clear: course work matters.

As states move to implement the Common Core State Standards, the positive impact core course work and advanced study can have on college readiness is already evident in the SAT performance of recent high school graduates throughout North Carolina and the nation.

According to The College Board’s 2012 SAT Report on College and Career Readiness, which was released this month, students who completed a core curriculum in high school did significantly better on the SAT than those who did not. A core curriculum is defined as four or more years of English, and at least three or more years of math, science, and social science or history.

Central to the report is the SAT College and Career Readiness Benchmark, which measures the academic preparedness of groups of students for higher education and beyond. Achieving the benchmark score of 1550 on the SAT is linked to a 65 percent likelihood of earning a B-minus average or higher during their freshman year of college, which in turn is linked to a strong likelihood of staying in – and graduating from – college within six years.

This year, 43 percent of SAT takers achieved the benchmark, suggesting more needs to be done to improve college readiness, even among college-bound students. The numbers are different, however, for those enrolled in a core curriculum. Forty-nine percent of those who completed a core curriculum achieved the benchmark, compared to only 30 percent of those who did not – nearly a 20-point improvement.

A similar result can be seen in the mean scores of North Carolina’s SAT takers, where the 72 percent who completed a core curriculum earned an average SAT score of 1508 – 111 points higher than the average SAT score of N.C. students who did not complete such work.

But the only way to track what percentage of college-bound students is meeting the benchmark is to ensure they take the SAT in the first place, which is why The College Board has made a continuing effort to increase SAT participation, particularly among underserved minorities and low-income students.

In North Carolina, 26 percent of SAT takers in the 2012 class took the test for free through the SAT Fee-Waiver Service. Nationwide, the College Board dedicated $44 million to SAT fee-waivers and related services this past year.

Our effort to democratize access to higher education is paying dividends. More than 1.66 million students from the class of 2012 took the SAT, 45 percent of whom were minority students and 36 percent of whom are the first in their families to attend college. In North Carolina, 39 percent of the state’s more than 63,000 SAT takers were minority students and 33 percent reported being first-generation college-goers.

Standardized educational assessments may not be glamorous, but when they are valid and well-designed, they can tell us a lot about how well we are preparing our children for postsecondary success and what we can do better.

As the new SAT report shows, increasing core curriculum completion rates and expanding access to advanced course work to qualified students of all backgrounds is the key to increasing college readiness and completion – in North Carolina and across the nation.