Changes underway for SAT
Holly Ratcliff
As of March 2016, the College Board will be administering a revamped SAT test for prospective college students.
“The world needs more people who can solve problems, communicate clearly, and understand complex relationships,” College Board published.
Since College Board has monopolized the determination of college readiness since 1941, if they say a new test will better test college readiness, then a new test there will be.
According to College Board, “The tests are designed to: [1] Measure the essential ingredients for college and career readiness and success, as shown by research. [2] Have a stronger connection to classroom learning. [3] Inspire productive practice.”
While these have always been the priorities, some important changes have been made to this new test.
Much to the relief and joy of all students taking the SAT, “good news includes the elimination of the penalty for guessing,” College Board said.
Congratulations students, “C” has been restored as a preferential answer for all playing eeny-meeny-miny-moe among the answer choices.
“This way, every score represents a best effort because students can give their best answer to every question — there’s no advantage to leaving any blank,” College Board said, apparently not understanding the allure of blind guessing.
Another significant change is a more comprehensive score report.
“Reported scores now include subscores and cross-test scores,” College Board said. “With these additional scores, the SAT… provide[s] insight into specific strengths and weaknesses, helping students and educators see where students can improve.”
Probably the most controversial part of the new scoring system is Score Choice.
“Score Choice™ lets students choose which day’s SAT scores to send to colleges,” College Board said.
Colleges will be unable to see how many times the student took the test. While this could be preferential for some students, it could be deceiving for colleges if a student took the test a dozen times until a goal score was reached.
The most important thing for high school seniors to know is, “students don’t have to take the SAT again just because it’s changing in March 2016,” College Board said.
Colleges will accept both the new test and the old test for the next couple years; there is really no preference for which test.
Class of 2017 and down: congrats! There are “more scores for more insight”, and no penalty for blind guessing!
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