New SAT: Essay optional, Vocab indubitable (for real)
Inside Abington Senior High School on Saturday, anxious students joined thousands across Pennsylvania and New Jersey in sitting for the new SAT - the exam's first major overhaul in over a decade.
Inside Abington Senior High School on Saturday, anxious students joined thousands across Pennsylvania and New Jersey in sitting for the new SAT - the exam's first major overhaul in over a decade.
As if high school juniors and seniors don't have enough on their restless minds, preparing to take the heavily redesigned test added a level of uncertainty. With its release finally here, students can now grade the new test.
Sean Welch, 16, a junior who took the SAT at Cheltenham High School, said the math section was challenging, but he gave the new exam high marks for matching his schoolwork. "It encapsulated my education. It was just something that I already knew," he said.
The revamped SAT is supposed to be better at drawing from students' day-to-day knowledge and feel more in step with other tests.
No longer will students fear the quirky guessing penalty found in virtually no other college readiness assessment. It was removed. The new three-hour test is broken into fewer sections for reading, writing, and math. The essay portion is now optional and scored separately. And with that change in scoring, students are once again striving for a perfect 1,600.
Joe DeFrancesco, a counselor and test coordinator at Council Rock High School North, thinks most students will like the new format. "This new test should ease some of that anxiety because there are less sections and they're longer," he said. "But then again, I'm not taking the test."
Kathryn Gerhard, 16, a junior at Abington, said she didn't know what to expect. "I took the old one two weeks ago," she said. "I wasn't sure how it would compare, so I wasn't as nervous."
"It was really hard," Brittany McCullough, 16, a junior at Phil-Mont Christian Academy, said of the math section, a common refrain. "I prepared for it the best I could. I don't think SATs are worth stressing over," she said.
The new math section is harder, many say, with more algebra and less geometry. Students can now use a calculator for only part of the math assessment.
Adam Roman, part of the husband-and-wife team behind Roman Tutoring, said his SAT students, drawn from Bucks and Montgomery Counties, were invited Friday night to eat cupcakes, get a T-shirt, and listen to a pep talk. He advises them to take the essay, which adds 50 minutes to the test.
"I call it the not-so-optional essay," Roman said. "To me it looks like cutting corners a little bit, even if schools are not requiring it."
Ireleigh Benner, 17, said the essay drew on her experience writing a rhetorical analysis. "If I wasn't in the AP class I don't think I would have known how to do that," she said.
Last year the 1.9 million students who took the ACT, a rival exam, surpassed the 1.7 million students tested on the SAT, developed by the College Board.
The College Board insists competition was not the primary motivator for change. Rather, it says, it was time to make the test clearer and go deeper into skills students need for college success.
The changes meant a shift away from memorizing flash cards of rarely used words like "contumacious," and instead focus on the meanings behind a more academic vocabulary, such as the word "synthesis."
"Driving to hockey practice listening to SAT words, that's probably not the most productive thing that you could be practicing," said Stacy Caldwell, vice president of college readiness assessments at the College Board.
Nationally, the College Board expects 463,000 students to take the redesigned SAT this month, which would be an increase over last year.
The changes come at a time when numerous colleges have shifted application requirements away from the one-day assessment, which costs $43 or $54.50 with the essay. Last year the University of Pennsylvania and Swarthmore College removed the essay section of the new SAT from consideration. Hundreds of colleges, including Temple University, St. Joseph's University, and Bryn Mawr College, have made the SAT optional.
Joe DuCette, senior associate dean of assessment and evaluation at Temple, was part of the group that developed an alternative for students to apply without submitting an SAT. He said that route, known as the Temple Option, is ideal for "students who do very well in high school but don't do well, in general, on standardized tests."
Still, for the majority of college-bound students, SAT performance remains an important predictor of future academic success.
"Does the new SAT predict GPA as well as the old one did? That's the question that will have to be asked a year from now," DuCette said.
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