Beginning in March, students will take a redesigned SAT that, according to the College Board, does away with the difficult vocabulary section and adds in more straight-forward questions based on real world college and career concepts.
Cyndie Schmeiser, chief of assessment at College Board, said the changes to the test came after the discovery that of the 1.7 million students who took the SAT in 2015, only 42 percent were ready to enter college without the need for remedial courses—a statistic she calls “staggering.”
“As we stepped back, we thought we needed to rethink assessment and not only help more kids become prepared for college or career, but we need to connect them with opportunities to help them navigate that pathway to college, which is not always a clear one,” Schmeiser said. “We redesigned the SAT to focus very clearly and specifically on those skills that are necessary for college readiness and success. These are the skills that students are learning every day in the classroom, but we are focusing very clearly on really what matters. We are not measuring everything students learn, but those that research has told us are most important.”
Schmeiser said the College Board stays on top of curriculum changes at the high school level and regularly adjusts the test to follow those trends. The last time the test received a major change was in 2005.
Marita Cleaver, coordinator of advanced academics at McKinney ISD, said the revamping of the SAT brought the test into the 21st century.
“To me, the redesign really was a natural consequence of what is happening right now in education,” she said.
New test, new features
The new SAT, which will be administered for the first time to MISD students beginning March 5, will continue to test in math, reading and writing. But, the way those areas will be tested has changed, Schmeiser said.
“The test is a little shorter—there are fewer questions—but we are still focused on testing kids’ college-readiness skills in reading and writing and in math, and there is also an optional essay. The subject areas are still the same, but the approach within and what we are measuring in those areas have changed quite a bit,” she said. [polldaddy poll=9296999]
“We thought to make it the most consumer-friendly, we thought making [the essay portion] optional or allowing each higher-education system to decide whether to require it gave our constituencies the most flexibility,” Schmeiser said.
The College Board also changed the way students study for the test. Instead of paying for costly SAT practice courses and study materials, the College Board partnered with the Kahn Academy to now offer SAT practice materials online for free.
“Over three-quarters of a million kids have already gone into satpractice.org and have practiced with over 15 million problems,” Schmeiser said. “We are getting feedback from kids stating that the new test is more of a reflection of what they have learned in school. We are getting a lot of reinforcement from kids and colleges as well. Frankly, they are finding the questions to be very clear and straightforward, so we are excited and very optimistic and are looking forward to the first test date in March.”
MISD adjustments
MISD board of trustees President Amy Dankel said MISD administers the PSAT, an SAT prep test, to all sophomores.
“We test our sophomores just to make sure we are catching any of those kids whose parents are not encouraging them to take the ACT or SAT,” she said. “We are able to test those kids who otherwise wouldn’t even consider taking the SAT and going on to college to show those kids and their families the potential the child has. And I’m really glad now the PSAT matches the new SAT test.”
Although sophomores will have ample time to prepare for the new test, juniors will have taken the old PSAT and will take the new SAT, something Chris Thorson said was an unnerving task for her daughter, a junior at MISD.
“The problem that we found was she did say the PSAT was easier, but all the materials to study for it really weren’t available at the time she took it,” Thorson said. “There was some material out there, but students didn’t know what was going to be on the test for a long time. So what happened was we started this process in the 10th grade and got a tutor to help her prepare for the old test. So when she took the PSAT, it was totally different because by that time they had released the new version.”
Thorson said she feels moving forward, the newly redesigned SAT will be a benefit to students, but since the juniors were faced with two separate tests in a transitional year, her daughter “just kind of got stuck.”“We really didn’t have that much time,” Thorson said. “There weren’t books at the store you could buy, and it really did feel a little rushed. It was very stressful, and even still parents who didn’t know the deadline for [signing up to take the old SAT] was December, then their kids will have to take the new SAT in March and they may not be prepared for that.”
When changes to the test began to circulate last year, Geoff Sanderson, MISD chief program evaluation officer, said he quickly began planning the district’s approach to preparing students.
Sanderson said the first thing MISD did to prepare students was by readying students for the PSAT, usually given to 10th- and 11th-grade students as an introduction to the SAT. Whether the students like the new format is yet to be determined, he said.
“I think the biggest indicator will be to see how many of our 11th-graders took the current PSAT test—molded after the new SAT—then turned around and took the old SAT test [in January] during its final administration,” Sanderson said. “That would give us some indication of the opinions of our kids who opted to take the old test while they still could.”
Thorson said the study materials offered on the College Board’s website will be valuable if the student using them is ultra-disciplined.
“A tutor can look at the practice test and see what your kid is not understanding,” she said. “But I know some folks cannot afford to hire a tutor, and for them the stuff online will be
valuable. I’m just not sure it’s going to give you what [my daughter] got with a [tutor].”
MISD is continuing its efforts to prepare students by tweaking its SAT camps held in the late summer and early fall, Cleaver said.
“We knew there was going to be a new SAT official preparation guide coming out in the spring, and we ordered that newly designed resource for our summer camps and used that for our rising sophomores and juniors,” she said. “We hope that training will still apply this spring when they take the test. You can prepare as much as you can, but nothing beats actually taking the test itself. This is a high-stakes test. I think being exposed to the PSAT test will help our sophomores in particular.”
