Meet The New SAT: READING
SAT Reading, known at one time or another as Critical Reading or just plain Verbal, has transformed dramatically over the decades. Who could forget such classic question types as Analogies or Antonyms? But the new SAT will continue the College Board’s attenuated move from testing vocabulary to testing passage-based reading. Sentence Completions, the last vocabulary intensive question type, are being relegated to the dustbin of flashcard history. With their removal, the SAT Reading Test will focus entirely on the assessment of specific comprehension and reasoning skills in relation to appropriately challenging passages across a range of content areas: Emphasis on words in context Emphasis on command of evidence Inclusion of informational graphics Specified range of text complexity Numbers 1 and 2 on this list are nothing new, but this redesigned SAT will be testing these concepts more rigorously. Number 4 won’t matter much to students but may be of interest…
Meet The New SAT: SCORING
The SAT has always stood out as the classic standardized test, in which a population of test takers would earn raw scores that would then be scaled according to the standard distribution in a classic bell curve. This aspect of the SAT is not changing. In fact, the new test brings everyone back to that familiar 1600 scale: 200-800 for Evidence-Based Reading and Writing plus 200-800 for Mathematics. Students will also receive 2-8, as opposed to the current 2-12, for each of three traits for Essay, the results of which will be reported separately. The big change is the shift away from the wrong answer penalty, often erroneously dubbed the guessing penalty. The College Board is taking another page from the ACT handbook in implementing “rights-only scoring,” in which testers earn a point for each correct answer but lose nothing for incorrect answers. This is a radical departure for an…
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…
When Should You Take SAT Subject Tests?
Everyone with college admissions on their minds knows about the SAT and ACT. Unfortunately, far fewer of us think about SAT Subject Tests when planning which tests to take and when. Considering how many colleges require, recommend, or consider Subject Tests in admissions, such an oversight can be costly. The College Board offers SAT Subject Tests across a variety of subjects: English, two levels of Math, two areas of History, three sciences, and lots of languages. Think carefully about which SAT Subject Tests are right for you. Students sitting for these tests should consider testing in the subjects they excel in and hope to pursue in college. Either Math Level 1 or Level 2 is usually expected, but students on a math or science track should sit for Level 2. The question for many students, especially those targeting competitive schools is not if they should take SAT Subject Tests, but…
Georgia Tech Superscoring
If you’ve done any research into test scores and college admissions, you know that every admissions office can evaluate SAT and ACT scores in its own way. Some schools will consider your best single administration of the SAT or ACT. Other schools, however, recognize the value in accepting scores from more than one test date. These schools superscore, which is to say they allow you to send scores from multiple test administrations, from which they piece together your optimal score from your best scores in each section. Until recently, then, we’ve had colleges that superscore either the SAT or ACT, superscore both, or superscore neither. However, a new option has entered into the equation: Georgia Tech superscoring. Georgia Tech has a novel approach to the SAT vs. ACT dichotomy. Instead of looking at the tests as separate instruments, the admissions officers see them as interchangeable: Evaluating your Test Scores We…