<p>Inside Higher Ed :"Coaching and Lasting Out New SAT"</p>
<p>"It took the College Board years to admit that coaching could help students taking the SAT. At the boards annual meeting Friday, officials admitted that the new writing test a key part of the new and expanded SAT is coachable, with significant gains possible for those who would otherwise receive low scores.</p>
<p>At the same session, board officials suggested that they arent likely to please those who have been pushing the board to let students many of whom complain that the SAT is now too long take the different parts of the SAT at different times. The College Board had previously announced that it was reviewing the idea, which high school counselors have been pushing. But the head of a College Board committee said Friday that the only approach under consideration was letting students retake the SATs parts in separate sittings, and that everyone would need to take the entire SAT at least once in one sitting...</p>
<p>Andy Lutz, head of research and development for the Princeton Review, said that the College Board is correct that the writing test is coachable. The College Board is right and surprisingly honest for once, he said. Lutz said that the Princeton Review commissioned a third party study on this that wont be out until next year, but that all the evidence he is seeing from Princeton Review counselors suggests that the new writing test may be the most coachable portion of the SAT.</p>
<p>He echoed the views of many college officials who have decided not to use the writing test in saying that its approach is flawed. Its a bad way to measure writing skills a 25-minute essay on an esoteric subject.</p>
<p>Many of the SAT essay questions are philosophical in nature the debut question, for example, was on whether majority rule is always right and some think that the nature of the prompts contributes to their coachability as students are taught a mix of tactics to formulate good essays.</p>
<p>Ed Colby, a spokesman for the ACT, said that testing service had not conducted research on the coachability of its new writing test. But he said that ACT intentionally picked non-esoteric topics for essays so that student responses would be more natural. Recent topics have included high school dress codes and the best time for the start of a school day.</p>
<p>Robert Schaeffer, public education director of the National Center for Fair and Open Testing, said that it was irresponsible for the College Board to just accept the way its tools give more help to those who are wealthy. If coaching works, how is the SAT a common yardstick when an admissions office cannot tell whether an applicants score reflects intensive coaching or no preparation at all?</p>
<p>Is Fatigue a Problem?</p>
<p>With the addition of the writing test, the SAT is now 3 hours and 45 minutes and from the first time it was given last year, students, parents and counselors have been complaining that the test is too long.</p>
<p>When several hundred counselors wrote to complain, College Board officials said that they would study their recommendation that students be allowed to take separate parts of the SAT at separate times. Camara said that the College Boards research has found that the length of the test does not affect students ability to do well. The board compared the rates at which students provide incorrect answers or skip questions and those rates are constant throughout the test. If fatigue was causing problems, Camara said, the rates wouldnt have stayed constant.</p>
<p>Previously, College Board officials have said that the organizations SAT Committee was studying the possibility of letting students take the test in separate sittings. John Barnhill, director of admissions and records at Florida State University and chair of the SAT Committee, said that College Board officials had determined that every student needed to take the test in its entirety at least once.</p>
<p>Barnhill noted that each SAT includes some questions that are being used to plan for future SAT versions and arent part of the students actual score. If students could take the different parts of the SAT at separate sittings, he said, they might not answer those beta questions and that would hurt the test.</p>
<p>The SAT is considering letting people who take the test multiple times select only one part to take again, he said. For students who take the SAT more than once, many colleges allow students to take the highest score they received on each part of the SAT, so a student may be evaluated on a mathematics score from one day she took the test and the critical reading score from another day.</p>
<p>Currently, such students must retake the entire SAT, although Barnhill said that many such students will focus only on the part for which they are trying to raise a score and will ignore the rest of the test, not worrying about the low score they will get on other sections.</p>
<p>The College Board is studying whether such students might be spared having to go through the entire test a second (or third) time, he said. But logistics may make that difficult as well, he said, since currently students dont know the order of the test.</p>
<p>FairTests Schaeffer said that the College Boards approach to the issue showed the fundamentally inconsistent way it examined policy questions. Limiting the opportunity for separate sections of the SAT only to those who can take the test multiple times gives an additional leg up to students from upper-income families who can afford to pay the College Board multiple registration fees, he said.</p>
<p>The question the College Board should ask is whether the scores are equally valid, he said. If taking sections separately on a re-test does not damage the SATs predictive value, why does the same reasoning not apply to a students initial administration of the exam? he asked."</p>