@xiggi : “Fwiw, dropping the guessing penalties will bring a different dimension to the SAT. Ultimately, there will be fewer and fewer differences between the two tests.”
Well this is exactly the point, isn’t it? The ACT is widely seen as the more favorable test to the majority of students (Around 75% of the students in my senior class who took both did better on ACT than SAT, most by a wide margin) and so the College Board has to dumb down their test in order to keep pace and regain widespread preference. The elimination of a score-affecting essay prompt, the shift away from testing vocabulary, the adoption of more knowledge-based instead of intuition-based questions: these are all differences that, until now, made the ACT the preferred test of American students. And the College Board fears for their economic survival, not the survival of education as a whole.
Sophomores and freshmen better get cracking on their college essays, because with the rapidly impending death of standardized college admissions testing, subjectivity will become the largest factor in admissions soon.