Hoping to appease critics, the College Board has unveiled plans to make the most significant changes to the SAT in the exam's 76 year history.
The new test, which will be introduced in the spring of 2005, abandons the 1600 as the gold standard in favor of 2400, reflecting the exam's three sections -- mathematics, critical reading and writing. The mathematics section, the only hold-over from the current SAT, will test knowledge learned up to the third year of high school. The new critical reading portion will contain the reading comprehension questions currently found in the SAT's verbal section, while the new writing section will resemble the current SAT II Writing test, including questions about grammar and usage and a 25 minute composition. The analogies that comprise part of the verbal section will be eliminated. the additional sections, time, and correcting procedures will increase the cost by ten to twelve dollars -- from $26 to an estimated $38.
The changes clearly demonstrate that the College Board recognizes that the SAT needed an update -- and that it does not want to lose the University of California system as a customer. But the changes do not go nearly far enough. If the College Board wants to craft an SAT for the twenty-first century, much more drastic changes are needed.
The reforms fail to take into account the popularity of SAT test preparation courses, which claim to coach a student to do better on the exam -- for a fee, of course. Students who are likely and able to enroll in prep courses will continue to do so, despite the SAT revision.
Rumblings about racial biases on the SAT will not be quelched by the SAT revision -- the theorhetical race discrepancy has not been proven to be pinpointed to a particular aspect of the test, but rather, is presumed to be the result of great disparity of American educational systems. No SAT revision can solve that equation.
While the 2005 revision is much needed, it is not a revision that will solve the larger problems of the SAT I or the college admissions process as a whole. The new SAT I does not provide the right answer to the critical educational question.
