Rowan County high school students continued a five-year trend of improving SAT scores after a dip in 1999.

Their average this spring — 986 out of a possible 1,600 — is the school system’s highest ever on the college preparatory test.

The system is just two points behind the state average of 988, the closest Rowan-Salisbury students have ever been to the state average.

Students in the Kannapolis school system — where scores had risen 70 points between 1993 and 1999 — dropped 37 points this year to 910.

Rowan-Salisbury Superintendent Dr. Joe McCann attributes his system’s increase in part to computer software, study guides and teachers in all the high schools available to help students prepare for the test.

“I’m pleased that we have continued to make progress,” McCann said this morning. “We’ve put in place — and I think you’re seeing the effects of — efforts to prepare students for the SAT.

“ ... We’ve buckled down on curriculum and content. We’ve raised the bar.”

East Rowan High School students scored an average 1,012 this year. That’s higher than other Rowan-Salisbury high schools performed, surpasses the state average and comes within seven points of the national average.

“We’re extremely proud,” East Principal Dr. Harry Starr said. “They took the test seriously. I guess the thing that amazed me most was that 67 percent took the test this year, compared to just 57 percent last year.”

North Rowan High recorded the largest increase among Rowan high schools — jumping 79 points. South Rowan High showed a five-point increase, and Salisbury and West Rowan high schools saw their averages drop.

The percentage of all Rowan-Salisbury’s graduating seniors who had taken the test dropped last year from 52 percent to 48 percent. Fifty-one percent of Kannapolis graduates took the test.

In the nation, 44 percent of high school grads took the SAT; in North Carolina, the number was 64 percent.

A.L. Brown Principal Janice Carty called the drop in the Kannapolis average disappointing but not typical.

“Certainly we are not pleased with the decline, but we are confident that we will rebound to continue the upward movement,” she said. “We have already looked at the SAT scores of our current senior class, and those scores are significantly higher than the scores just released.”

Prepared each year by the Washington, D.C.-based College Board, the Scholastic Aptitude Test is the test most North Carolina colleges use to determine whether a student can attend. It also helps colleges decide where to place students initially, though they usually consider other criteria.

The highest score a student can achieve on the three-hour, timed test is 1,600 — 800 on the verbal section and 800 on the math section.

Cochran cautions parents and teachers from using SAT scores to rank and evaluate schools. He said the scores are influenced by each child’s economic status and motivation during middle and high school as much as it is instruction and curriculum.

“The increase simply means that this group of graduates had a higher average than previous groups,” Cochran said. “There is no single cause for the increase, just as there is no single reason why scores dropped last year.”

Cochran also said that colleges consider much more than a student’s SAT score.

“It is only one piece of information used by colleges,” Cochran said. “If it was an infallible measure colleges probably wouldn’t use anything else to make admissions decisions...

“Having said that, do we want to see SAT scores increase each year? Yes ... To what can we attribute these high scores? There is no single final answer.”