Reuters: Despite warnings, College Board overloaded new SAT with wordy math problems

“Internal documents show the makers of the new SAT knew the test was overloaded with wordy math problems – a hurdle that could reinforce race and income disparities. The College Board went ahead with the exam anyway.”
Read it here: http://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/college-sat-redesign/

Oof.

Any changes in the difficulty of an exam taken nation-wide will reinforce some sort of disparity: making the SAT harder in general will make the SAT harder for everyone who takes it. Nobody will be impervious to that. In this case, making SAT Math wordier will make the test more difficult for, well, ALL test takers. Indeed, those who struggle with reading comprehension MIGHT be hit more, but is this characteristic only limited to race/income? Do certain people have greater inherent reading comprehension skills sheerly based on their race/income? The argument should then be, “Should we make SAT problems harder through increasing the wordiness?”

@GMKoon - making the M section more reading-intensive definitely hurts lower income test takers and lower-fluency internationals and 1st gen immigrants far more than it does other groups. There’s data out there if you look around enough. What’s more, now that both W, M, and even E require solid reading skills, students who don’t read at a very high level are punished in all three portions of the exam.

But I thought the new SAT was easier?

Eh, not really. The old test was more “crammable” (vocab alone could get literally anyone up to 650+ in CR, for example, and the old persuasive essay format was more template-able), but the new test has fewer Q types and RW can be boosted extremely quickly by mastering a very narrow range of grammar principles.

The CB giveth and the CB taketh away.