The average SAT scores for students attending Kootenai County’s three largest public school districts exceeded the national average, but there is significant room for improvement in Idaho and beyond.

High school students are falling short locally, and throughout the country, when it comes to reaching career-and-college-readiness benchmarks set by the College Board, the national nonprofit that offers student programs and services like the SAT and the Advanced Placement Program. These are the scores students need to make in order to have a 75 percent chance of getting a “C” average in college courses of the same subjects.

The new SAT, developed to determine what individual students need to know to be successful in college, has a combined reading and writing section and a mathematics section, each worth 800 points. With a maximum possible score of 1600, the national average for the 2015-16 school year was 984.

The 17,470 students who took the test in Idaho on April 12 earned an average score of 999. The average total score for Coeur d’Alene students was 993. In Post Falls, it was 1026, and Lakeland students’ average score was 1066. Students at Coeur d’Alene Charter Academy, where the focus is on college prep, had an average score of 1285.

The College Board’s career-and-college-readiness benchmark for the reading and writing section of the SAT is 480, and the benchmark for the mathematics section is 530.

Idaho students earned an average score of 506 for the reading and writing section with 62 percent making the benchmark. The average score for the math section was 491 with 35 percent reaching the benchmark.

In the Coeur d’Alene School District, the average reading and writing score was 506 with 60 percent of the test takers meeting the college-and career-readiness benchmark. In math, 32 percent of Coeur d’Alene students reached the benchmark, with an average math section score of 487.

“I think we have a good base to be able to work from. This is the very first time the SAT has been given in its new format, so we’re looking at the results holistically and looking at where the best areas to improve are,” said Mike Nelson, director of curriculum and assessments for the Coeur d’Alene School District.

Nelson said he is not concerned that only 32 percent of the district’s juniors are deemed college and career ready in math. He said this year, more students made the benchmark than last year. Even though the test changed, the College Board still had a college preparedness benchmark, Nelson said.

The Post Falls School District had an average SAT score of 1026. The district’s average writing and reading score was 522 with 71 percent of the test takers making the benchmark. Its average score for the mathematics section was 504, with 40 percent of the test takers reaching the benchmark.

“Obviously we’re doing better in the state than others, but there’s always room to improve,” said Post Falls School District Superintendent Jerry Keane. “It’d be great to be 100 percent (students making the college-and-career-ready benchmark). Even though that’s probably not likely to happen, we’ll keep moving forward.”

Lakeland School District students saw an average SAT score of 1066. The average writing and reading score was 539 with 76 percent of the test takers making the benchmark. The district’s average mathematics score was 527 with 53 percent of the test takers making the benchmark.

“Our scores are moving in the right direction,” said Timberlake High School Principal Kurt Hoffman, when asked about his school’s SAT scores. “We still need to do some work to improve them, specifically in math and our overall percentage of students who are college and career ready.”

Although the SAT is a way to rank students, it is not by any means the only way. Colleges and universities look at a large variety of things when assessing potential students.

“The SAT is not the one measure to see if a student is college ready,” said Jeff Church, the chief communications officer of the state department of education. “Instead of looking at that one snapshot of that one day of taking the SAT, colleges are really looking at the bigger picture where they consider the SAT, GPA, dual credits and so on, that create an elevated picture of a child instead of using this one snapshot.”