<p>Although they pushed for the change, I disagree that the writing score will make or break a candidate for UCLA or UCB. I think that grades, and overall SAT are more important, and ECs are becoming more important each year. UCB uses 680 (old SATIIWR) as it's cut-off for kids not having to take the freshman English course -so apparently that's not considered such a bad score. Until they can norm this test and correlate it with the old SatII, it doesn't mean a whole lot.</p>
<p>The changes that were also very important with the UCs were the ones made to the critial reading (no analogies) and math(more advanced). One can directly compare these two test scores with the old SAT scores.</p>