It’s just hard to get worked up about SAT scores. In all our years at the Herald, we’ve learned that Johnston County’s average SAT score is predictable only in its unpredictability. The average climbs for a couple of years, then falls. Schools that do well one year fall off the next. (That’s especially true of small schools, where, quite frankly, the quality of test-taker can vary widely from year to year.)

So we no longer celebrate when Johnston schools make impressive gains in any given year or when their scores climb for two or more years in a row. But neither do we want to rake the schools over the coals when scores fall markedly or consistently.

Simply put, the SAT is a rather poor measure of the quality of any Johnston high school. Then again, the folks who designed the SAT did not intend for it to be such a measure. They designed it to suggest how well any given high school student might perform in college. The funny thing now is that some colleges have stopped using SAT scores in their admission criteria. They’re putting more emphasis on high school grade point averages, class rank and extracurricular activities.

We applaud Johnston County’s high schools for posting an SAT average this year that tops the state and national averages. But we will not be shocked if next year’s average falls below those other averages.

What we hope, really, is that every Johnston student this year earned the score he or she needs to get into the college of his or her choice. That’s assuming, of course, that he or she needs an SAT score at all.