Withstanding a test of time
New SAT aims to be more meaningful
Everybody loves to hate the SAT, but the breathtaking changes to the 88-year-old college entrance exam unveiled here last week caught just about everybody by surprise.
The new test, due in the spring of 2016, will make the dreaded essay optional and return the test’s perfect score from its current 2,400-point-scale to 1,600 points. It will shrink total test time by 45 minutes and abandon vocabulary questions built around what even College Board President David Coleman conceded is a “wall of obscure words.”
In its place, he said, will be a test that more accurately tracks what students learn in school, focuses more tightly on a few key concepts and doesn’t force kids to rely on expensive test-prep courses or “last-minute tricks or cramming” to do well.
“It is time to admit that the SAT and ACT have become far too disconnected from the work of our high schools,” he said during last week’s announcement. “We aim to offer worthy chal-
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lenges, not artificial obstacles.”
The new changes, the first since 2005, come in the face of several recent challenges for the College Board itself, including skepticism from colleges about the test’s usefulness and competition from the rival ACT test.
Also, higher college-going rates for low-income and minority students and more competition for slots in college freshman classes are pushing educators to ensure that all students leave high school ready for the rigors of college. But the rise in college-going is accompanied by a disturbing statistic: By the College Board’s own research, the percentage of “college ready” high school graduates has been essentially unchanged since
“It is time to admit that the SAT and ACT have become far too disconnected from the work of our high schools.”
David Coleman, College Board president
2009 at about 43%.
The new test, Coleman said, is a “call to action” to make the test a better tool to help students get ready for college.
“From my perspective, David is doing what he said he would do,” said Kati Haycock of The Education Trust, a Washington, D.C.based advocacy group for low-income and minority students. “This is a guy who cares about all kids having the opportunity to learn rigorous content, and the things that are important to learn, not just random bits.”
Haycock noted that the number of low-income and minority students wanting to go to college, often for the first time in the history of their families, is “off the charts,” but that many of these kids are dropping out once they get to college.
Recent statistics from the U.S. Department of Education show that between 1972 and 2009, the percentage of low-income high school graduates immediately enrolling in college jumped from 23% to 55%. But their overall rate of attaining bachelor’s degrees by age 24 remained essentially unchanged, from 7% to 8%.
“The idea that it’s enough for kids to aspire and enroll is clearly not sufficient,” Haycock said. Many make it to college, “but a lot of them are crashing and burning.”
In announcing the changes, Coleman was also responding to competition from the rival ACT test, which for the first time in 2012 enrolled more students than the SAT. Both tests are under pressure from colleges’ growing skepticism about whether a onetime exam really tells admissions counselors enough about prospective students.
“There’s a fundamental problem with the SAT,” economist Anthony Carnevale said. “It was a test that was built in the ’30s, to try to find Einstein behind a plow out there.”
Carnevale, who directs Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce and is a one-time vice president of the Educational Testing Service, which administers the test, said the SAT “has outlived its usefulness,” because many educators now say a single test can’t predict college success. “It predicts perfectly higher-income kids with good grades,” he said.