At a time when adolescent anxiety is on the rise and attention spans are a challenge, high school students will take a modified version of the SAT on Saturday that is partly aimed at reducing stress, according to the College Board, which administers the test.
The exam time is now 2 hours and 14 minutes instead of 3 hours, giving students more time to complete each question. Reading time will be significantly reduced and candidates will be able to use an online graphing calculator throughout the mathematics section of the exam.
And after 98 years of students writing their answers on paper, the SAT is going completely digital for the distance learning generation.
The College Board said pilot testing showed the exam was as rigorous as a paper test, but less intimidating for students. Students with ADHD and dyslexia, as well as students learning English, also report being able to “stay focused” on digital tests compared to previous formats, said Jasree, director of communications for the College Board.・Mr. Carayol said.
Administering the test digitally would also reduce the chance of cheating, the College Board said, since few students take the exact same exam. In both reading and mathematics, candidates who perform well early in the exam will be exposed to more difficult questions as the exam progresses. (The College Board states that scores are accurate regardless of question difficulty.)
However, there are critics. The switch to short reading passages is not widely welcomed among English teachers. Many believe that students need to develop higher reading comprehension skills in the face of constant distraction from technology.
The latest overhaul of the exam comes at a difficult time for the standardized testing industry, where most universities have eliminated exam requirements.
The number of college applicants submitting SAT or ACT scores plummeted from 76 percent in the 2019-2020 admissions cycle to 45 percent this year, according to Common App data.
While Yale, Dartmouth, and Brown universities recently made waves by reinstating standardized testing requirements, saying scores are the best predictor of academic success, most far less selective universities is unlikely to follow suit, said Mary L. Churchill. Associate Dean of the Wheelock College of Education and Human Development at Boston University.
The average acceptance rate for four-year colleges is 73%, and most colleges do not face the challenge of having to finely differentiate a vast population of talented students. In fact, many admissions officers are using test-optional policies to encourage more applications, as some smaller colleges are facing enrollment shortages and are on the verge of closing. Dr. Churchill said:
Amid this changing landscape, the College Board has successfully promoted the SAT to state policymakers as an essential part of the high school experience, and 16 states now offer students the opportunity to consider the SAT as an integral part of their later life plans. Rather than requiring or encouraging students to take an exam during class. high school.
A total of 1.9 million students in the high school class of 2023 took the SAT, and two-thirds of them took the test for free during class. The class of 2019 had 2.2 million test takers.
Students take the exam on an app called Bluebook. In a way, I'm trying to recreate the experience of working with paper. There are tools to highlight, annotate, and cross out multiple choice answers that students think are incorrect.
Candidates no longer have to read long passages or go back and forth between pages of accompanying questions. Instead, they work on a much shorter series of sentences (some just her one paragraph), each associated with her one question.
Yoon S. Choi, CEO of CollegeSpring, a nonprofit that provides in-school test prep for low-income students, said the new format is a boon for many, especially English learners.
But others, including some educators serving the same student population, expressed skepticism about the College Board's revisions.
“It seems like maybe they're trying to cater to this generation that reads a lot on the Internet and travels a lot,” said Ariel Sachs, a New York City public school English teacher and author. The content of the book argues for the importance of assigning full-length novels. “But I don't think that's setting high expectations for what students should be doing as high school seniors, and I don't think it's setting effective expectations.”
Ms. Carayol of the College Board acknowledged that reading comprehension is important, but said the essay SAT was also not a good test of that skill.
“Long test passages cause students to search the text quickly for answers instead of reading carefully,” she wrote in an email. “By shortening sentences like this, there are huge benefits for students. If a sentence makes her feel uncomfortable or confused, she doesn't have to string eight to 11 questions together with each sentence. You can skip back.”
At North Houston Early College High School, Adair Rivera, a 17-year-old senior, takes the SAT in the School Day Program. He wants to be the first member of his immediate family to attend college and study computer science.
Mr. Adair said he received higher scores on digital practice tests than when he took the paper SAT. He hopes to attend either MIT or Yale, which require test scores, or the University of Pennsylvania, which does not require test scores.
“This is a game changer,” he said of the shorter reading passages and shorter exam times. “Students don’t get tired as quickly.”
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