In response to the 2015 New York Times op-ed,
What’s wrong with colleges wanting students with higher than average “native intelligence”?
@epiphany This debate, so to say, began when you and some others kept on giving the impression initially that the new SAT will be so easy. That statement I had been digging deep into because it’s not clear to me that it all will be, but we’ve already spoken about that
I thought the only true goal of the new SAT was to regain market share away from the ACT and anything else Coleman says is just an academic justification for that to happen.
One reason folks started gravitating to the ACT away from the SAT in my region was that the ACT was shorter and there were fewer sections. Learning that there was no sentence completions was an added bonus. Of course Coleman picked up on these popular reasons for the ACT and is simply mimicking them. There is no academic justification for any of those changes, just a business one.
For the math, they believed linking it to Common Core would be a success because it would be more relevant to school math, as the ACT is believed to be. However, people in my region are also struggling with Common Core math
Likewise, I thought the changes ten years ago, were similarly motivated by the University of California’s threat to no longer accept the SAT if the writing section were not added on. Anything about the removal of analogies or quantitative comparisons, I thought, was just part of the justification.
Obviously the impacts of the changes on marketshare and college admissions remain to be seen. I suspect they will not be good though. The AP has been making changes that is discouraging learning a lot of high-level actual content in favor of just a little bit of content and at a superficial level. Some colleges have responded by no longer accepting the score or by increasing the score required for credit.
The lack of organization does not bode well either. That book with the 4 tests is embarassing. At least the last roll out had 8 tests with an answer scale in plenty of time. Here students are half a year before test, some of whom like to do their studying in the summer, and how the test will be graded remains unknown. I don’t understand why the rush in the roll out
By chance, some students may sign up for the new SAT and pull a good score. But it does not seem like a safe bet in terms of preparing for something with so much unknown, so I stand behind my position of preparing for the current SAT or ACT
I’ll answer more later, but I do not agree that Coleman’s “only” goal was to compete with the ACT. It’s one of many goals. Those goals are obvious both from his words and from the test design.
They also gravitated because they perceived the ACT to require less breadth of understanding, to be “easier,” to be more like textbook questions, and to require less literacy in the essay portion. IOW, they perceived it would be easier to ace.
Coleman has responded by making most of the verbal sections of the new SAT even easier than the ACT, while keeping the same “category” organization that the ACT has.
The new test’s Verbal portion will be easier for excellent readers, as it won’t require knowledge of advanced vocabulary. But it will be harder for poor readers or low-fluency internationals because brute force mastery of thousands of advanced vocabulary words won’t guarantee a 600+ score (as it will on the current exam). The new Verbal section is less “preppable” in that regard.