The College Board has also been grappling with complaints that the old SAT, with its arcane vocabulary questions, correlated with advantages like parental income and education, and that whites and Asians performed better on average than blacks and Hispanics.ĭr. But it gives less time for more questions, and has a science section.Ĭompetition for market share has been growing, and in 2012, the ACT surpassed the SAT.Ĭollege Board officials said the new test was devised to satisfy the demands of college admissions officers and high school guidance counselors for an exam that more clearly showed a connection to what students were learning in school. The ACT, created by the company of the same name, is based on surveys of curriculum across the country and is over all considered more straightforward. Furda, the dean of admissions at the University of Pennsylvania. “We’re going to need to see how they did, which test is going to be better, how can we weigh it,” said Eric J. When students open the exam, “I think to some degree the sticker shock - that first impression - is almost even worse,” he said.Ĭollege admissions officers say they are just as confused. Jay Bacrania, the chief executive of Signet Education, a test-prep company based in Cambridge, said he found blocks of text from the new test to average at least a grade level higher than text from the old one. But given the more difficult reading level of some passages and more demanding curriculum, “it may be the rich get richer,” he said. The new SAT is probably less correlated with I.Q. Jed Applerouth, who runs a national tutoring service, estimated that the new math test was 50 percent reading comprehension, adding, in a blog post, that “students will need to learn how to wade through all the language to isolate the math.” “I feel like they put in a lot of unnecessary words,” she said. She knew a femur was a leg bone, but was not sure about “anthropologist.” She was contemplating “Madagascar” just as she remembered her teacher’s advice to concentrate on the essential, which, she decided, was the algebraic equation that came next, h = 60 + 2.5 f, where h stood for height and f stood for the length of the femur. “An anthropologist studies a woman’s femur that was uncovered in Madagascar,” one question began. It may be harder in the administration of this new test to decipher that, because there is so much text on both sides of the exam.” “Before, if you were a student from a family where English was not the first language, you could really excel on the math side. “It’s going to change who does well,” said Lee Weiss, the vice president of precollege programs at Kaplan Test Prep, one of the nation’s biggest test-preparation programs. College admissions officers say they are waiting to see how the scores turn out before deciding how to weight the new test. It has also led to a general sense that the new test is uncharted territory, leaving many students wondering whether they should take the SAT or its rival, the ACT. The shift is leading some educators and college admissions officers to fear that the revised test will penalize students who have not been exposed to a lot of reading, or who speak a different language at home - like immigrants and the poor. The College Board, which makes the SAT, is rolling out a new test - its biggest redesign in a decade, and one of the most substantial ever.Ĭhief among the changes, experts say: longer and harder reading passages and more words in math problems. BOSTON - For thousands of college hopefuls, the stressful college admissions season is about to become even more fraught.
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