2008 Woodie Awards
The New SAT: Thank Goodness It's Over for Us
Does this new SAT honestly reflect what students are taught?
Genesis Whitlock
Issue date: 4/8/05 Section: Opinions
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When I talk to my students or my children about the SAT, assuming it doesn't go through another significant change by then, I'll tell them with a sigh, "When I was your age, we had to solve analogies, and we didn't have to write extraneous passages." Now that significant changes have been made to the college entrance exam we all know and love, a question arises: Does it prove that kids are better educated and need more challenge and, if so, does that bring us old school testers below par?
The College Board, an organization comprised of over 4600 educational institutions, announced last year that current high school juniors would be the first to experience the 'new SAT.' There's no longer just 'Verbal' and 'Math' sections. The bureaucrats have decided to make things more difficult by implementing new categories. Here are the changes:
First, there's the 'Critical Reading' section, which includes reading comprehension, completing sentences, and paragraph-length critical reading. Analogies are now nonexistent; apparently, the College Board felt they weren't relevant to college preparation. However, a mixture of short and long reading passages designed for multiple-choice critical analysis double the fun.
Then there's the 'Mathematics' section, which includes the standard algebra and geometry. Only now, students get to experience questions on functional notation, manipulations with exponents, and properties of tangent lines. And, for the statistics lovers, there are extensive probability and data analysis questions.
There's also a new addition: the 'Writing' section. It's comprised of a twenty-five minute short essay, where a student develops a given point of view using readings, observations, and experiences (think lots of BS); and a thirty-five minute multiple choice section, where students identify grammatical errors, fix poorly organized gerunds, and improve wordiness and awkwardness.
The College Board wants students who can read well, write proficiently, and have an understanding of math to enter their institutions, and I agree-college is a place of higher learning where students expound on, not formulate, basic knowledge. I also think the College Board seems to be asking a lot from students who are taught in an educational system that's inferior to its international counterparts. I'm not discrediting the educators themselves in the United States; rather, I feel that the education system doesn't allow them to instruct children to the fullest potential. Teachers are not required to educate anymore; rather, they're encouraged to "prepare students for college," which basically means training them to pass the SAT and other standardized tests.