Even in the pursuit of the best and the brightest, UF is not immune to a national dip in SAT scores among high school graduates.
High school students who graduated in 2011 nationally averaged a reading score of 497, three points lower than last year and the lowest on record, according to a report by the College Board, which administers the SAT.
The writing average score dropped two points to 489, and the math average score went down one point to 514.
At UF last year, the SAT average was 1993 points, but this year it has dropped 35 points to 1958, said Steve Orlando, UF spokesman.
"It's reflective of the national trend," he said. "We're not concerned about it."
About 1.65 million students took the test nationally.
Normally, UF's SAT scores have been increasing, but this year followed the national dip.
"One year doesn't make a trend," he said.
Orlando said the decrease of SAT scores doesn't say anything about the students recently admitted to UF.
"SAT scores are only one of a lot of pieces we look at when it comes to admission," Orlando said.
The UF admissions office looks at the kind of course load a student handled during his or her high school years.
Both the kind and difficulty of coursework give a more accurate view of the student in comparison to SAT scores alone, Orlando said.
Of the 29,000 students who applied in 2011, just 11,423 high school graduates made it through the application process.
Of those, 6,400 students decided to come to UF in the fall, he said.
Those other 5,023 went to other schools for their college education, including MIT, Stanford, Duke and more, Orlando said.
"We unfortunately said ‘no' to a lot of outstanding students," he said.
In the state of Florida, UF was the university with the third most SAT scores sent for consideration, according to a College Board report.
The University of Central Florida was number one and Florida State University was number two.
The SAT was taken by 114,769 students in Florida during this past year, according to the College Board report.
Each one of the three SAT sections is scored from 200 to 800, with 2400 being the highest possible score a student can earn.
This year's combined average was 1500, which is six points less than last year's, 1506.
For students in Miami-Dade, the county that sends the second most students to UF with 4,132, following Broward County with 4,900, scores aren't looking much better.
All scores in Miami-Dade on average were lower this year, following the national blip of decreased SAT scores.The scores decreased less than the state average but more than the national standard.
Of those 12,780 Miami-Dade County high school students who took the SAT this year, the average reading score was 467.
That's 20 points less than the Florida average and 30 points less than the national average, according to a memorandum from Alberto Carvalho, Miami-Dade superintendent of schools.
The Miami-Dade high school students averaged a score of 466 in the math section, 23 points lower than the Florida average and 48 points below the national average, according to the memo.
Writing-section scores for the Miami-Dade students this year averaged 452, which is 19 points less than the state-average and 37 points less than the nation's average.
The students' average SAT reading scores fell six points from 2010, their math scores fell three points and their writing scores dropped five points.
