Changes to SAT Make Test More Coachable

Beginning in March 2005, high school students will be taking a significantly different SAT I. Algebra II will be added to the Math section of the test, which will lose its Quantitative Comparison questions. In the Critical Reading (formally know as Verbal) section, analogies will be replaced by short critical reading questions.

The great change that the test will undergo is the addition of a third section that will be equally weighed with Math and Critical Reading. This Writing section will be modeled after the SAT II Writing Exam and will include multiple-choice grammar questions and an essay.

Together, analogies and quantitative comparison make up slightly more than a quarter of the current SAT. Because both question types are unfair to students unfamiliar with the test and are highly coachable, I am pleased to see them go.

But any improvement in the test due to the elimination of analogies and quantitative comparison questions will greatly be overshadowed by the worsening of the exam by the addition of the writing section.

The Writing section will now make up a third of the exam. This is troubling because SAT II: Writing is proven to be the most coachable high school entrance exam. The Princeton Review, the country's largest test preparation company for college entrance exams, has independently verified that their average student increases his or her SAT I score by 140 points over the course of the class.

While this is quite impressive, considering that the SAT has only 1200 points possible (scores range from 400 to 1600) and the average course is only 35 hours long, it pales in comparison to the score improvement on the SAT II: Writing exam. On average, a student who enrolls in a Princeton Review SAT II: Writing test will improve his or her score by 137 points. This is absolutely shocking when one considers that the classes are only ten hours long and the test score ranges from 200 to 800 points. In other words, a normal high school student can reasonably expect to raise his or her Writing score by 23 percent (in raw points) in about the time it takes to watch the Indiana Jones trilogy.

Last week, the chair of UC Academic Senate's Board of Admissions and Relations with Schools stated that "the new SAT will also be geared more toward testing the student's mastery of the high school college preparatory curriculum." I question how a test that is so coachable can possibly test high school curriculum.

If it does, why are America's teens wasting time in school when they can learn all the material needed for the test in a couple of weekends? SAT used to stand for Scholastic Aptitude Test and then for Scholastic Assessment Test. Since the mid-1990s, SAT has been an empty acronym. It tested exactly what it says it did-nothing. And now it will be even worse.

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