Meet The New SAT: INFLUENCES
According to the College Board, the redesigned SAT continues to emphasize reasoning while adding a clearer, stronger focus on the knowledge, skills, and understandings most important for college and career readiness and success. While they would have you think this substantial revision was demanded by colleges, the trigger seems to have been more economic than academic in nature. The year 2012 marked the first time more high schoolers took the ACT than the SAT. The margin was only a few thousand more that year, but has ballooned dramatically as teens throughout historically SAT-focused regions like the Northeast discovered the friendlier test out of Iowa City. After nearly nine decades, the SAT’s reign as America’s predominant college entrance exam has ended. This matters because the new SAT has adopted a great many of the features that once set the ACT apart. But that rival test is not the only profound influence…
Meet The New SAT: INTRODUCTION
The SAT has reigned as one of America’s most influential and impactful tests since the College Board administered its first multiple-choice college entrance exam back in 1926. As you’d expect, the exam has changed quite a bit over nearly a century of notoriety and number 2 pencils. This newest revision, however, may say more about the SAT’s future than its storied past. That the SAT is changing should come as no surprise to anyone at least marginally connected to students in high school. The College Board has been releasing information over time towards two important deadlines: October 2015: Students will take the new format PSAT. March 2016: Students will begin taking the new format SAT. This means that students in the high school graduating class of 2017 will be the first to take the new SAT if they choose. Of course, they don’t have to, since any of these students…
Six Spontaneous Reactions to the New PSAT
The College Board finally released a full practice PSAT/NMSQT Practice Test in the new format. I’ve deliberately tried to steer clear of the previously released questions so that I might be able to evaluate the new PSAT with fresh eyes. But as I reviewed each section of this new test, I couldn’t help but recognize a lot of familiar features… 1. A 60-minute Reading section seems very long. On the other hand, 47 questions in 60 minutes allows a lot of extra time. 2. The College Board appears to be running as far as possible from its old policy of testing advanced vocabulary words. Not only are Sentence Completions gone, but the contextual vocabulary questions here focus on relatively common words. 3. Graphs seem misplaced in a Writing and Language Test. 4. The College Board drastically underestimates how much anguish the No Calculator Math Test will cause in modern teens.…