The new SAT has been revealed

[Shinobu]

Saying its college admission exams do not focus enough on the important academic skills, the College Board announced on Wednesday a fundamental rethinking of the SAT, ending the longstanding penalty for guessing wrong, cutting obscure vocabulary words and making the essay optional.

The president of the College Board, David Coleman, criticized his own test, the SAT, and its main rival, the ACT, saying that both had “become disconnected from the work of our high schools.”

In addition, Mr. Coleman announced programs to help low-income students, who will now be given fee waivers allowing them to apply to four colleges at no charge. And even before the new exam is introduced, in the spring of 2016, the College Board, in partnership with Khan Academy, will offer free online practice problems and instructional videos showing how to solve them.

The changes are extensive: The SAT’s rarefied vocabulary challenges will be replaced by words that are common in college courses, like “empirical” and “synthesis.” The math questions, now scattered across many topics, will focus more narrowly on linear equations, functions and proportional thinking. The use of a calculator will no longer be allowed on some of the math sections.

Among other changes, the new test will not ask students to define arcane words, relying instead on vocabulary used in college courses. The new exam will be available on paper and computer, and the scoring will revert to the old 1,600-point scale — from 2,400 — with top scores of 800 on math and 800 on what will now be called “evidence-based reading and writing.” The optional essay, which strong writers may choose to do, will have a separate score.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/06/e...n-sat-announced-by-college-board.html?hp&_r=0

I can't say anyone's losing out on much with the removal of the writing section.

 

[Leggo]

These reforms sound good.

Though, it doesn't really matter to me anymore since I'm already in college. xD

I think the highest I have gotten on the writing section was an 8. The second time I took the SAT, I was distracted by my No. 2 pencils since I usually used mechanical pencils.

Taking out the penalty system (for wrong answers) for the SAT seems similar to taking out the penalty system for AP tests.

The SAT was basically a guessing (gambling) game for me as I did try to skip some questions if I didn't know them.

With the new changes, this SAT does sound easier than the former.

 

[Dorothy LaRouge]

Ugh, wish I'd had this last year. I had to take my SAT while still under the effects of sedatives from my wisdom teeth surgery. I mean, I still did decently, but with this new test I probably would have done pretty good.

 

[Jolene]

It seems the "If you don't know you just don't know" philosophy for these tests no longer apply.

 

[Nero the Giant Whiscash]

Ugh, wish I'd had this last year. I had to take my SAT while still under the effects of sedatives from my wisdom teeth surgery. I mean, I still did decently, but with this new test I probably would have done pretty good.

aw that sucks i had all my teeth cut out almost 5 years ago now which one pf the reason i have the nickname of catfish or my pokemon friends call me Whiscash and/or Nemo

 

[Hector]

Man kids these days are getting things so easy... *

*mumbles something about having had to walk to school uphill both ways in the snow barefoot*

*now feels old having made that reference*


Now for my thoughts on the changes:

I've blogged about my academics in the past at some length (well back when I was still in college) and the removal of the writing section does hurt one subsection of students: That being the ones (like myself) who can write quickly, accurately and effectively. In addition to that, the dumbing down of the test is another factor that will hurt students like myself, who relied on their incredibly high test scores and extracurricular activities, rather than their high school grades, to get into one of those elite universities (top 15, top 25, top 50 whatever... you know, the hyper competitive schools where you need every bit of advantage you can get... and a little bit of luck on the side). The reason that I say this is that with a dumbed down test, scores will naturally increase (by increase I mean the scores on the two remaining sections, not a total increase). And with the removal of 800 points, it will be harder to separate yourself from the pack with your test scores. For instance, someone with scores on the old test of 2320 (I'll use a hypothetical 800 math, 740 reading, 740 writing as an example) loses one of those high numbers, making their new score say a 1540. Still good, but doesn't jump off the page like the first number did. Especially since the average score is going to go up with the changes. So yes, while the subset of students that loses out with the removal of the writing section is very small, it does exist (reiterating that I would have been one of those students if I were a sophomore in high school right now rather than a BC alum).

That being said, the application fee waivers and the partnership with Khan Academy are great ideas that should help to level the playing field just a little bit. The SAT had been criticized in the past for being racist (an unfair accusation) and classist (a fair accusation), so anything that can help address those concerns is a good thing.

 

[proserpina]

Honestly, although I absolutely agree with the fee waivers and some of the changes do sound very appropriate, having the double-edged sword that is the perspective of being in another kind of academic system entirely, all I can think is that some of this stuff sounds even easier than ever. I didn't think too highly of the SAT from what I had already heard and that hasn't changed much, save for the more realistically appropriate adaptation to include "college" vocabulary and disallow use of calculators in some mathematics sections. I'm all for making academia more accessible for those of all classes and backgrounds, but the SAT didn't sound very intellectually stretching compared to other systems I am familiar with and still doesn't now.

 

[Bolt Strike]

I don't think removing the writing section is a good idea, the ability to argue a point in a clear, logical manner is an invaluable skill in the workplace and in everyday life. It really devalues one's education to have the writing de-emphasized.

As for the general "tests have become disconnected from the work of our high schools" argument, I'd say that the problem is the high schools, not the standardized tests. The SATs, ACTs, and AP exams I felt, were much better indicators of college success than my high school grades, and that's because high school IMO doesn't do a good job of promoting a good work ethic, which is invaluable in college and in the workplace. It's mainly the same rote memorization that you can coast on in grade school.

 

[Phoenicks]

Changing the test will give an immediate advantage to the well-heeled who can afford new practice books. Otherwise smart kids will always do better than dumb ones -- any shifts will be nuanced over time. Those nuances are too many in detail. For example, will anyone get a significantly better test score because esoteric vocabulary words are stripped away?

 

[Shinobu]

Changing the test will give an immediate advantage to the well-heeled who can afford new practice books. Otherwise smart kids will always do better than dumb ones -- any shifts will be nuanced over time. Those nuances are too many in detail. For example, will anyone get a significantly better test score because esoteric vocabulary words are stripped away?

I think it will help those who can afford coaching and preparation materials, but not exactly in the way you describe. The vocabulary is by far the hardest aspect of the test to coach students for, so making it less esoteric helps the test prep market substantially. It's kind of ironic considering that the College Board is also trying to dampen the comparative advantages that paid test prep provides.

Keep in mind that score scaling should take into account the difficulty of the test and content changes. Even if higher scaled scores become more common, they're just a representation of percentiles, which are what really matter.

 

[GastlyGibus]

I'm of the opinion that the SAT's should never have existed in the first place. It's a terrible method of grading "potential," and all it does is freak people out and destroy their self-esteem if they do bad, which most of the time, you will do bad taking it for the first time because of the stress put on it. It's treated as some all-important test where if you don't do good, you're obviously a terrible human being and you should just go work fast-food for the rest of your life because you'll never amount to anything. >_>

On the other end of the spectrum, let's assume you do really well and get top scores. Now, instead of the kids having a destroyed self-esteem, now they've got an inflated ego. "Woohoo, I got 2200/2400! Obviously I'm super smart or something!" Congratulations, you're good a memorization and pointless trivia. Way to go, I guess.

The SAT is a joke. It's so horribly flawed and broken, and nobody is willing to admit it.

Just my $0.02.

 

[Shinobu]

Congratulations, you're good a memorization and pointless trivia. Way to go, I guess.

Actually if you want to show your mastery pointless trivia you'll want to take the US history subject test. Regardless I think you may be overstating how much value people put into SAT scores. Usually if people do badly they take it again. If they do well they usually don't. "Well" and "badly" are very subjective in the case of SAT scores since everyone has a different goal depending on to where they're applying.

 

[King Fissamé]

Probably is because of the timing, some people can't finish math problems in 20 minutes, I just took the SAT, and I struggled more on the reading section, since I usually take my time to read the passages

 

[Phoenicks]

I'm of the opinion that the SAT's should never have existed in the first place. It's a terrible method of grading "potential," and all it does is freak people out and destroy their self-esteem if they do bad, which most of the time, you will do bad taking it for the first time because of the stress put on it. It's treated as some all-important test where if you don't do good, you're obviously a terrible human being and you should just go work fast-food for the rest of your life because you'll never amount to anything. >_>

On the other end of the spectrum, let's assume you do really well and get top scores. Now, instead of the kids having a destroyed self-esteem, now they've got an inflated ego. "Woohoo, I got 2200/2400! Obviously I'm super smart or something!" Congratulations, you're good a memorization and pointless trivia. Way to go, I guess.

The SAT is a joke. It's so horribly flawed and broken, and nobody is willing to admit it.

Just my $0.02.

How would you compare so many American students? Pretend we eliminate this proxy for an intelligence test. How would you go about assessing intelligence?

 

[Dorothy LaRouge]

How would you compare so many American students? Pretend we eliminate this proxy for an intelligence test. How would you go about assessing intelligence?

There is no accurate way to assess "intelligence," because intelligence is such a vague and nebulous concept at its core and may vary wildly even within a single person depending on what subject you're looking at.

 

[GastlyGibus]

How would you compare so many American students? Pretend we eliminate this proxy for an intelligence test. How would you go about assessing intelligence?

Define "Intelligence."

 

[Shinobu]

How would you compare so many American students? Pretend we eliminate this proxy for an intelligence test. How would you go about assessing intelligence?

The SAT isn't an intelligence test. Even though the College Board removed "aptitude" from the name, it's still designed to test aptitude for doing college work.

 

[Phoenicks]

Here's a (fair use) quotation from "The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life" by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray for consideration. Italics are original, bold is my emphasis:

That the word intelligence describes something real and that it varies from person to person is about as universal and ancient as any understanding about the state of being human. Literate cultures everywhere and throughout history have had words for saying that some people are smarter than others. Given the survival value of intelligence, the concept must be still older than that.

.... Yet for the last thirty years, the concept of intelligence has been a pariah in the world of ideas. The attempt to measure it with tests has been variously dismissed as an artifact of racism, political reaction, statistical bungling, and scholarly fraud. Many of you have reached this page assuming that these accusations are proved....

[A summary of intelligence and social science research after Darwin follows, until:]

[Charles] Spearman noted that as data from many different mental tests were acumulating, a curious result kept turning up: If the same group of people took two different mental tests, anyone who did well (or poorly) on one test tended to do similarly well (or poorly) on the other. In statistical terms, the scores on the two tests were positively correlated. This outcome did not seem to depend on the specific content of the tests. As long as the tests involved cognitive skills of one sort of another, the positive correlations appeared.

[The premise is that testing shows that people who perform such-and-such on one test tend to perform similarly on a different test.]

Furthermore, individual items within tests showed positive correlations as well. If there was any correlation at all between a pair of items, a person who got one of them right tended to get the other one right, and vice versa for those who got it wrong. In fact, the pattern was far stronger than that. It turned out to be nearly impossible to devise items that plausibly measured some cognitive skill and were not positively correlated with other items that plausibly measured some cognitive skill, however disparate the pair of skills might appear to be. ....

[Now for one potential answer to the question asked:]

Why are almost all the correlations positive? Spearman asked. Because, he answered, they are tapping into the same general trait. Why are the magnitudes different? Because some items are more closely related to this general trait than others. ...

[This "general trait" was named g for General Inteligence.]

Spearman then made another major contribution to the study of intelligence by defining what this mysterious g represented. He hypothesized that ][1]g is a general capacity for inferring and applying relationships drawn from experience. Being able to grasp, for example, the relationship between a pair of words like harvest and yield, or to recite a list of digits in reverse order... . This definition of intelligence [2]differed subtly from the more prevalent idea that intelligence is the ability to learn and to generalize what is learned. .... Spearman's intelligence was a measure of a person's capacity for complex mental work.

[1] and [2] are both different ideas (hypotheses) of what intelligence is. They can each be supported in some way by data and studies (for another post). These are not the only definitions of intelligence, which is hard to define. But just because a thing is hard to define does not mean it does not exist. (Where does Earth's atmosphere end?)

(None of this defines the moral, social, economic, or spiritual worth of a human. It is an idea to look at.)

 

[Lysandre]

I'm not keen on the writing portion being made optional/separate. If you're going to a college where SAT scores are considered gospel, you're almost certainly going to encounter the type of writing that the essay section tests for on a regular basis, and to simply be able to choose to omit said portion without any immediate scoring consequence is ridiculous. I sympathize that not everyone will be excellent at essay writing, but students who excel at writing but not at math or science cannot simply wave their hands and make their own weak points disappear. In a test format that seems to be changed increasingly in favor of eliminating any possible forms of discrimination, it's inane to discriminate against those whose strongest points are in a specific field (and yes, I know it is 'optional,' but again: strong writers cannot vouch to eliminate another section themselves, and those who are weak at writing but strong in the other portions can opt out with no issue, so it is not an equal plane).

If we wanted to make it so that nobody was forced to tackle an element they were weak at, we could not have this test to begin with, as its purpose is to evaluate students' readiness for college in each field they will almost certainly be required to work in. To eliminate the requirement of proving that one can even make a coherent argument or form an original sentence does no favors to anyone in any subject, as those skills are required across the board. At this rate we're manufacturing a race of robots with degrees who can regurgitate what has been taught to them by help books, programs, and flashcards but cannot even express the underlying implications in original terms.

 

[Fairy Ice Ricky]

While I can understand why people would be critical of the idea that the writing section will soon be an optional section on the SAT, I think we're over-hyping this just a bit, because this so-called "optional" writing section will most likely not be optional. Keep in mind that the College Board isn't doing anything new here, like at all. The writing section for the ACT is technically an optional section, and yet many schools still require that you submit a score for that section with your application in order for your application to be considered, should you choose to submit an ACT score instead of an SAT score. I have a strong feeling that the schools that already require this optional section on the ACT for their application are also going to require this soon-to-be optional section on the SAT. (And I'd be very surprised if a school does a complete 180 and don't require the writing section from either the SAT or the ACT.)

And just an FYI, many schools already require optional College Board-administered tests, anyway. SAT Subject Tests are, technically speaking, optional tests, but many schools still require that you submit at least one SAT Subject Test score (most of them require at least two) with your application in order for your application to be considered. So schools already have a precedent of requiring optional tests/test sections from College Board and non-College Board organizations.

So again, while I understand why people would be critical of the idea of making the writing section optional on the SAT, I think in practice, at the very least, the schools that require the writing section of the ACT will also require the writing section of the SAT, which essentially means that nothing would actually change. Unless of course Congress or the Supreme Court say that it's illegal/unconstitutional to require optional tests for college applications or something.

EDIT: I completely abused the use of the word "optional" in this post, just ignore and keep on moving with your lives, kthxbai.


But I am confused about this fee waiver business--I thought you were already able to get fee waivers for score submissions? I'm pretty sure I submitted, like, everything--my scores, my applications, and some additional financial-aid related forms--for free. Granted, I had to get those waivers through my guidance counselor, so maybe this means that they'll be cutting out the middleman or something?