New York Times Article about the Redesigned SAT

Test Preparation SAT Preparation
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CB regularly recycles test forms for Sunday and international administrations because the numbers of students taking the test on those days is too low to make enough profit with a newly written form.

This is a short-sighted policy, because the validity of international and Sunday tests affects the validity of US Saturday tests. It would be better to look at test security as a whole and to factor the cost of new forms for all sittings into the overall test cost.

Most people in the US are not aware of CB’s recycling practice and its consequences. If I were a US parent whose kid lost a spot to an international student whose scores were inflated by a recycled test, I would be pretty angry.

However, in my opinion, the only things that might make CB change the recycling practice are public outcry or government regulation. CB has a big budget for political lobbying. Do you see any political leaders calling for government oversight of the SAT?

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Hear, hear.

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No. It tests both. Further, good writing is built on good reading. How one writes about a particular text is an indication of how well one has understood the text. In fact, in my obviously minority opinion, among the verbal sections (I’m not a math teacher but an English teacher) the only improvement in the new SAT is the essay portion. Every other verbal section is Mickey Mouse.

I don’t know where people get the idea that the old SAT “didn’t test vocabulary in context.” Um, just like the new test, it asked, “In Line X, the word profane most nearly means…” Also, ever heard of Sentence Completions? That’s called Vocabulary in Context. The Old SAT had it; the new one does not.

I’m going to say this again. I’ve said it recently on CC. If Coleman thinks that so-called “obscure” words (i.e., on the old SAT) are not encountered in college, then I don’t know which (normal) college he has in mind. College is high-level reading, folks. You see, college is supposed to be a step higher than high school, not just like high school.

Marvin and I are going to write our own test and sell it to colleges, so look out. JK. :wink:

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Hey, count me in when you write the new test. I’ll do the analogies! :wink:

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Oh my gosh, totally totally, @Plotinus ! In fact, do you know why the Analogy Section was removed from the old SAT? Because it tested intelligence! Oh, that dirty word. And, i.m.o., the unwritten reason that Sentence Completions were really removed this year was also for that reason: It was the only portion of the test which indirectly tested analogical thinking. Can’t have that, folks! Can’t have true critical thinking being tested: That will “disadvantage” students who have never been taught rigorous CT and frankly are then not college-ready. Hello.

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@Plotinus, I think your idea for ELLs/bilingual students is a great one to make the test fair: when students register for the test, they should be asked if they need bilingual accomodation under the form of a CB bilingual dictionary. NO definitions. Just translation(s) of the words. If the student doesn’t know it in his/her heritage/native/home language, then no point is earned. If they can’t pick the right “context”, no point. Exactly like for English native speakers. And the students wouldn’t be placed at an inherent disadvantage, where they wouldn’t be able to show what they know. This wouldn’t be available to standby and late registration, just like other accomodations aren’t. I think you should email CB!!

(And, yes, I was of course speaking about American students, not international students - students who speak Russian or Amharic or French or Lao or Wolof at home, navigate the world through two linguistic prisms and are thus enriched by this dual perspective and multi-layered understanding of language, who may have excellent reading and critical thinking skills, may be attuned to some nuances but not others, and who would read 18th and 19th century prose with a dictionary in college.)

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@MYOS1634

It’s an interesting idea to allow translation dictionaries. There are certain national school-leaving tests for which dictionaries are allowed. For example, for some national school-leaving tests that involve translating classical Latin or Greek, the students are allowed to bring one translation dictionary into the test room.

However, I think in the case of the SAT, the logistics and security implications would probably make bringing additional resources into the test room too complicated. It’s also not that easy to pick out “bilingual” students or “American” students – there are a lot of gray areas here.

It would be simpler for CB just to write a test with the type of language that does not create test bias against bilinguals – that is, CB should check that test scores correlate just as well with the first year college grades of bilinguals as with the “hot potato” groups (women, minorities, etc.). Instead, the new test has the appearance of trying to INCREASE bias against bilinguals.

In a follow-up article, the New York Times article quotes people who think the new language is a specific strategy targeted against international students, especially from Asia:

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/12/us/readers-respond-to-redesigned-and-wordier-sat.html

"Several commenters raised broader questions on why the SAT needed revamping. A commenter named Vince, who said he worked in the international admissions office of a New York state college, cited an “exponential increase in the number of international applicants” to American universities in recent years. “It has become increasingly difficult to evaluate these candidates and verify their test scores,” he wrote. “If we were to consider mainland Chinese applicants — who travel by the thousands to Hong Kong to take the SAT in convention-hall-sized test centers and support an entire industry of tutoring centers that specialize in teaching students how to deduce answers from a handful of question formats — this could be viewed as a defensive move by the College Board to crack down on inflated international student SAT scores.”

I don’t see why all bilingual students, including elite American citizens, lower income minorities, and honest, hard-working internationals should be penalized by test bias because College Board has trouble maintaining test security in Asia.

How about ending the use of recycled tests instead?

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OMG, please tell me you’re being facetious.

Hello, am I missing something here? Isn’t this a test to assess READINESS for entry into universities w an ENGLISH LANGUAGE CURRICULUM.

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@plotinus when I said “vocab questions”, I meant sentence completions. When you ask a student what meaning a particular word in a text is supposed to have, it tests the student’s ability to analyze the author’s message and style. Additionally, if the word is unfamiliar, it tests the student’s ability to use the context of the sentence to deduce what meaning it should have. When I saw these questions on the PSAT, the words were not especially unfamiliar. Instead, they were words with ambiguous meanings. To determine the intended meaning required a comprehensive understanding of the text. On the contrary, when you ask a student to fill in a blank in a stand-alone sentence, it tests the student’s knowledge of the definitions of answer choices. Reading the sentence, one can understand what meaning the word in the blank should have, but the problem becomes determining which of the answer choices had that meaning. To make matters worse, the answer choices were often obscure words, so students had to guess at definitions of answer choices. Perhaps a student knew the meaning of all but one answer choice, and one of the words that they recognized appeared to make some sort of sense in the sentence. However, the answer choice whose meaning they did not know could very well be a better answer. To me, this is an unrealistic expectation, and it only partially tests students’ reading abilities.

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On the matter of college board test-recycling, thank god ACT exists. Sure, college board is not regulated by the government, but with a competitor, college board has to maintain test integrity to some degree for fear of colleges preferring ACT over SAT. It isn’t perfect, but it holds them accountable to some degree.

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I am not sure how you (or CB) define “obscure”.

Is a word “oscure” because a certain percentage of current students don’t know the meaning?

Or is a word “obscure” because the ability to use it correctly is not correlated with first year grades in college (and more broadly, college performance in general)?

I am in favor of a test that has words that are “obscure” in the first sense but not in the second sense. I don’t have a special preference for sentence completions versus questions about passages.

On the other hand, the GRE (the equivalent of the SAT for master’s and doctoral level students), has much more difficult sentence completions that does the old SAT. At least grad schools of arts and sciences think that certain really obscure vocabulary questions are a good measure of academic performance. In the future, students heading for graduate school won’t know what hit them when they face the GRE verbal section. CB does not seem to care much any more about the kind of students who go on to Ph.D.'s and master’s degrees.

Based on the October PSAT’s, I would say the redesigned SAT has increased the number of obscure lexical items that are not correlated with academic success in college and has decreased the number of obscure lexical items that are correlated with academic success in college. However, I haven’t done any statistical studies so this is just a subjective impression.

Quite honestly, I far prefer analogies to sentence completions because analogies seem to me a much better test of reasoning ability.

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Another thing that troubles me about the new test is that it is going to be even harder for really talented math students to distinguish themselves from students who are just competent in basic school math and good in reading. Even the old test did not do this so well, but the new test seems even worse in this regard. People who would be successful math majors at Cal Tech or electrical engineers at MIT are going to score the same or maybe even worse in math than people with much less raw math aptitude who are going to be econ majors or lawyers. The modern world needs talented math and science people to fix climate change and find cures for diseases. We should not turn them away with nath verbiage for the sake of political correctness. The verbal people can shine in the verbal section.

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It’s in your imagination that MIT and Caltech students are weak in critical reading.
In reality their SAT CR scores are very high. Caltech students have the highest SAT scores.

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@coolweather You have really misunderstood my point. I am talking about students who vwill be turned away from Caltech because they made careless reading or arithmetic mistakes in a dumbed-down test. I am not talking about the people who get accepted. Of course they have to have high scores to be accepted. But what do these high scores mean?You can get a high math score on the new test without being more than middling good in math.That’s the whole problem . Take a look at the new test and tell me if you think it is a good standard for deciding who goes to Caltech, and a better standard than was the old test.

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Surely, those gifted mathematicians/future STEM majors take the SAT math subject tests as part of the application process. Even the kids that take the ACT take SAT subject tests.

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@JenJenJenJen But, the Math Level II SAT subject test is also really easy for a future STEM major kid. There are a lot of 800s on it. Another low ceiling test.

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@Plotinus I apologize for misunderstanding your point.

On the other hand, MIT and Caltech accept many students because these students take more meaningful math tests (AMC, AIME, USAMO, ARML,…)

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@rustroll - actually, the ACT recycles too and its international tests have been subject to the same cheating schemes as the SAT. It just hasn’t hit the news yet b/c the ACT is still far below the SAT in Asian marketshare.

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@JenJenJenJen - Math Level II is in some ways even more boneheaded–it’s basically a calculator test, and the main way kids in Asia prep for it is by taking classes to learn how to best program their TI-91s &c.