Too Many Questions About SAT Section 5
Zen Buddhism famously employs paradoxical riddles to demonstrate the inadequacy of logical reasoning and to provoke enlightenment. I’m sure the monks would have a field day with this koan describing the current state of the SAT: When is a standardized test not standardized? You don’t need to have achieved nirvana to guess the answer to this one. The SAT stops being truly standardized when different forms of the test are administered without clarity on which questions actually count. In a sense, the SAT lost its claim to standardization a while ago. The December 2018 SAT definitely delivered that unfortunate point to an entire cohort of testers. Not only did the test seemed easier than practice tests, which had been the disappointing trend in 2018, but most test takers under standard group testing conditions who skipped the optional essay section–which, these days, is most of them–faced a mysterious fifth section of…