The SAT: more of the same prep, same anxiety?

Illustration: Zohar Lazar, from The New Yorker

First, if you haven’t already read it, see There’ll be some changes made, with the news report and a reaction or two on the announced changes coming to the SAT in 2016.

Since we have a couple of years until those changes come along, here’s some more test-prep reading…

1.  Elizabeth Kolbert, writing for the New Yorker, offers, “Big Score:  When Mom takes the SATs.” Kolbert relates her own experience, as well as that of Debbie Stier, author of The Perfect Score Project:  Uncovering the Secrets of the SAT, retaking the SAT as an adult, and covers a good bit of the test’s history as well.

Whatever is at the center of the SAT—call it aptitude or assessment or assiduousness or ambition—the exam at this point represents an accident. It was conceived for one purpose, adapted for another, and somewhere along the line it acquired a hold on American life that nobody ever intended. It’s not just high-school seniors who are in its thrall; colleges are, too. How do you know how good a school is? Well, by the SAT scores of the students it accepts. (A couple of years ago, the dean of admissions at Claremont McKenna College was forced to resign after it was revealed that he had inflated students’ scores to boost the school’s ranking.) As befits an exam named for itself, the SAT measures those skills—and really only those skills—necessary for the SATs.

I may be interested in reading about the SAT, but there is a less than zero probability of my registering to take the test, old or new. Just offering my real-world application of math.

2.  Walt Hickey, writing for FiveThirtyEight, offers advice in “How to Take the New SAT.” I’m likely to pay attention to his recommendations since FiveThirtyEight is the new data journalism organization headed by Nate Silver, statistician, baseball and politics forecaster, and author of The Signal and the Noise. Hickey examines the announced change that the SAT will no longer penalize test-takers for incorrect answers. Currently each wrong answer costs the test-take a quarter of a point.

Since the exam’s inception, students were advised to only guess on a question if they could eliminate at least one of the answers. This put expected value on their side, and they could hope to come out ahead in the long run.

Starting in 2016, with the death of the quarter-point penalty on wrong answers, there’s absolutely no reason anyone should ever leave a question blank on the SAT. According to College Board statistics, in 2012, every five points added to a test-taker’s raw score meant an additional 30 to 80 points on her curved final score.

So guessing isn’t just advisable, it’s about to become strategically crucial for people seeking to maximize their performance. Granted, everybody guessing is probably going to increase the average raw score, but that just means the College Board will adjust its grading curve commensurately.

If you choose not to guess, you risk falling behind the pack.

3.  Writing for The Atlantic, James S. Murphy says, “The SAT Prep Industry Isn’t Going Anywhere,” even though the  College Board president described their partnership with Khan Academy for free test prep, a “bad day” for test prep companies. Murphy has been an SAT teacher and tutor for the Princeton Review.

The truth is that there are no tricks to the SAT, or at least none that will make a significant change to a student’s score. Test prep raises scores by reviewing only the content students need to know for the exam, teaching them techniques they have not learned in school, and assigning students hundreds if not thousands of practice questions. It is this work, and not tricks, that overcome test anxiety. As Ed Carroll, a former colleague of mine, puts it,  “Competence breeds confidence.”

. . .

The main reason test prep isn’t going anywhere is that, as long as a superficial, high stakes test remains an important aspect of competitive college admissions, there will be no shortage of people looking for some advantage.  Admissions anxiety is not fomented by test prep companies. They do not need to make students and parent anxious.  The SAT has taken care of that for them.

4.  And finally, my favorite read on the SAT this past week:  Cora Frazier’s “New SAT Practice Questions” in the New Yorker. An example:

7. Student-produced-response math. You have one remaining pair of clean underwear, besides the pair you are currently wearing. You have an additional pair of underwear that doesn’t cover your entire butt and says “Thursday.” How many days can you go without doing laundry?

Now there’s a question with real-world applications.

Related articles

• RIP ‘SAT words’? Not exactly
• Students in praise of SAT changes

On the SAT: there’ll be some changes made

The College Board announced the details of its long-awaited revisions to the SAT this week. You’ve probably seen reports on these big changes:

Data, College Board
Illustration, NYTimes

1. The essay section will be optional and scored separately, changing the scale back to 1600 from 2400 (implemented in 2005).
2. The test will no longer penalize students for wrong answers (now, each wrong answer takes 0.25 points off the score).
3. Vocabulary words will be those students are more likely to see in college than the current, more obscure list.
4. The test will be offered on computers.
5. The College Board also tried to address the income-bias of the SAT by making fee waivers more easily available and by partnering with the Khan Academy for test prep.

Want to know more?

Eric Hoover, reporting for the Chronicle of Higher Ed, in Plans for New SAT Spark Mixed Reviews, outlines the changes and provides reactions from a number of college and college-prep professionals:

Ms. Leopold [executive director of CollegeTracks, a Maryland group that works with low-income and first-generation students] was skeptical of other changes in the SAT. “They do not address the underlying access problem,” she wrote, “that the College Board’s member colleges rely on a test that has been demonstrated to systematically understate the abilities of low-income and underserved minority students.”

. . .

Jeff Rickey, vice president and dean of admissions and financial aid at St. Lawrence University, in New York, praised several of the coming changes in the SAT. “I applaud the College Board for tying the test better to what’s needed in college, the way they will provide readings across the curriculum other than just math and English, and also ask for analysis,” he said.

. . .

Mr. Roberts [dean of admissions at the University of Virginia] and his colleagues don’t even look at the SAT essays applicants write—just their scores on the writing portion of the exam. When the essay is no longer part of the SAT, he wondered how many colleges would require or recommend that students write one.

“Colleges will require it if they think it’s a useful tool,” he said. “But the College Board’s going to have to convince folks that this is something that will help us evaluate students and predict success.”

The Story Behind the SAT Overhaul, by Todd Balf, published in the New York Times magazine, provides extensive details about how and why the changes were made, as well as how David Coleman, president of College Board, worked with critics of the SAT to develop the revised version. Coleman was integral to the development of the Common Core, now implemented in more than forty states.

By the time he took over in October 2012, Coleman was well versed not just in Perelman’s critiques but also in a much wider array of complaints coming from all of the College Board’s constituencies: Teachers, students, parents, university presidents, college-admissions officers, high-school counselors. They all were unhappy with the test, and they all had valid reasons.

. . .

In redesigning the test, the College Board shifted its emphasis. It prioritized content, measuring each question against a set of specifications that reflect the kind of reading and math that students would encounter in college and their work lives.

Finally, Jon Boeckenstedt, associate vice president of enrollment management for policy and planning at DePaul University, writing on the SAT revisions in The College Board and the Catholic Church, first provides his feelings on college admission tests:

–Any test created by someone who never taught the material to the students tested is inherently lacking
–SAT and ACT do explain freshman performance, but since the tests and High School GPA covary so strongly, it simply duplicates the effect of GPA, but does not do it better.  As an incremental measure over and above High School GPA, the benefit is negligible at best.
–GPA–even compressed GPAs from 35,000 different high schools–explains more about freshman performance than the SAT or ACT (no one from either organization disputes this, by the way).
–Both tests do, in fact, measure a certain type of intelligence: Picking the “right” answer from four given. And the fact that the tests might get it right 40% of the time seems good enough for many. However, this is not necessarily the way students “do” college.  In life as well as in many classes, sometimes you don’t even get the question; when you do, oftentimes the answer fails to be described in a few words.
–The tests have a very high “false negative” and a very low “false positive” for whatever it is (and we can’t always even define what it is) they purport to measure.
–Insecure people who have high standardized test scores are often the ones touting the value of standardized tests
–Super-selective institutions like the tests, even though they know it doesn’t predict much of anything academic, because: a) high numbers equate with “smart” and equate with “high quality” and b) they don’t need to, nor do they want to, take any risk on students, and c) they one thing they do measure really well–wealth–is important to many of them colleges.  It also gives them a convenient excuse to enroll fewer poor students.

Head over to the post to see what he thinks about the changes. Spoiler alert:  It includes the Who playing “Won’t Get Fooled Again.”

We have two children who won’t have to take the SAT again, old or new. Our third child, Mod Squad Linc, will be taking the PSAT in the fall of 2014 and 2015, then taking the SAT for the first time in the spring of 2016… just in time to try out the new test.

Related articles

• SAT Makeover Aims to Better Reflect Classroom Learning
• SAT changes set to take effect in 2016
• SAT Overhaul or Not, Standardized Testing Will Always Fail Students by Liz Prisley