I'm skeptical, given the shortened time and the elimination of longer essays. There just isn't enough material to accurately pigeon-hole someone - wrong answers earlier in the test will have far more effect on the score than ones designed to assess where you are within a subset.
New strategies will emerge with far more impact on the end result, and that will give wealthier families access to even more improvement from better training.
Add to that the simple loss of a whopping 26% of the test time and they might as well just admit that what they're shooting for is simply a way to weed out the bottom test-takers without impacting the so-called social justice aspect of admissions.
I'm sure the universities worked carefully with the college board to get what they wanted - an easier test and the ability to continue trying to assemble a study body that can more easily be indoctrinated than taught.
It is ENTIRELY unclear what they are doing and how it will be used. Will everyone get the same score, roughly, but the weaker students flagged? Or will only the “adaptive” score be known, and kids who scored well, but on easier material, be treated as equals to others?
And if admitted to elite schools based on these tests, will they be allowed to fail? Or will they just be given good grades? Will plagiarism, etc. be tolerated in order to give the illusion of competence? The epidemic of plagiarism involving current highly placed black females in academia does not bode well.
The GRE has been using computer adaptive tests for almost 25 years. The statistics are sound, and no kid getting 1500 should waste half an hour proving that he can do arithmetic perfectly over and over again. I am concerned with the bring your laptop part of it, as I'm sure people will figure out how to cheat
The College Board knows that an easier test with rising scores for minorities means more schools require it, more people take it, and they can claim that it is "fair."
The test has been getting easier for a long time now and the trend is only likely to accelerate. That's because the goal is not to accurately assess applicants. Instead, it's to continue to champion "diversity" while Asian-American and white kids engage in a hunger games to secure fewer and fewer spots at the most competitive colleges.
Meanwhile, these most competitive colleges have extensive tutoring services for unqualified admits who go on to resent their peers.
The biggest fix required for academic integrity - offer the test as a choice for "timed" or "extra time". And report that choice to the colleges.
The most obvious form of academic dishonesty concerning standardized tests is unreported extra time. And the colleges are equally guilty. Colleges are incentivized not to distinguish between tests taken with time vs 50% extra time. These inflated scores will then improve the overall scores that colleges report as their testing averages. Currently, the admissions office receives no information regarding test time as part of the college application...in order to protect the applicants medical privacy. When the number of untimed test takers is so high, there is hardly a stigma. And therefore hardly a reason to protect the medical privacy.
Extra time is offered to students who are diagnosed with anxiety, ADHD, or other disabilities. Unsurprisingly, the wealthier the student, the more access to a doctor who will provide that diagnosis. Some reasons for extra time are with merit - as my daughter's intelligent classmate with cerebral palsy certainly needed the extra time. But for the most part, these reasons for extra time are acquired through subjective testing from psychiatrists who are also incentivized to positively present a disability diagnosis. There is no bloodwork or ct scan or any definitive medical test to diagnose so many disabilities, and so it's a system that can easily be manipulated. Extra time is the cheater's loophole.
My daughter attends a high school with students along a wide socio-economic range. The wealthier the student, the more likely that their tests are arranged with extra time (school tests, standardized tests and even AP tests). Exactly half the students in her AP Calculus class receive extra time.
An alarming number of honors students (I'd love the statistic) take standardized tests with extra time at the public and private high schools nearby. At my daughter's school, more than one classmate is a National Merit Finalist, receiving extra time advantage. These classmates are nationally recognized for academic achievements as elite students. Though in the classroom, it's a different story. One of her classmates relies on her testing advantage - to complete tests after taking a break and sometimes finishing the following day. How is that even a test?? Needless to say, this student studies far less than others who must complete their work before the bell rings.
My daughter scored in the mid-1400's on the SAT, running out of time and guessing on the last problems. She took a few practice tests to prepare, and on the untimed tests, she's scored in the mid-1500's. If we were cheaters and her classmates played it fair, my daughter could have been the national merit finalist instead.
I'm pretty sure the SAT has been getting easier for years. 35 years ago, perfect scores of 1600 were extemely uncommon, now it seems every school district of any size has at least one every year.
Although I agree that something has gone terribly wrong with College Board and the SAT, the implication that the test is "easier" is wrongheaded. It's a standardized test, one that essentially produces a Gaussian curve. 1% of test-takers will score in the top 1% on the new Digital Test, just like the older paper test. If you are anxious about more students getting perfect scores, worry about the ACT--the number of students earning perfect scores has increased exponentially because that test's "DNA" and underlying assumptions are very different from the SAT.
The problem with the new Digital SAT isn't that it's "easy" (as one comment notes, her son "dropped 200 points" on the new Digital SAT) but rather that it may be irrelevant. The new Digital SAT doesn't have reading passages anymore, just single paragraphs followed by a single question. It's as if it were designed by TikTok. The difficulty now primarily derives from a brutal scale and distractors.
The author and nearly everyone writing about the SAT/ACT also seems to misunderstand a key element of "test-optional" admissions: they were never really optional. The author suggests that in 2019 he couldn't have known that these tests would soon not be "necessary"--but the data shows that the majority of accepted students submitted scores, even in the midst of COVID and that students who submitted scores--even scores below an institution's average--were accepted at a much higher rate than those who didn't submit. Purdue accepted only 3% of last year's class without scores. Unless you fit into a very special category, the SAT/ACT was never really optional.
To understand how Ivy-level American universities admit students you need to read Pierre Bourdieu, rather than Michel Foucault, and brush up on Castiglione's The Courtier, which advises aspirants who wish to navigate an aristocratic, courtly world in which those with power rarely mean what they say. It is puzzling that so few journalists seem willing to ask how institutions that don't share their $40 billion-dollar endowments even with their own students can serve "equity," or how Ivy League campuses that reject 95% of qualified applicants (and seek to reject 96% in the coming year, thus improving their "selectivity") can somehow embody "inclusion." The floating signifiers of "equity" and "inclusion" today primarily gain their meaning within structures of power that would be familiar to Sir Philip Sidney.
I fail to see how "adaptive" testing is superior to the old way. What's more, the College Board has already been dumbing down the SAT test for decades now; a double 800 is not the intellectual achievement it was in the 1970s (back when I took it and barely managed double 700s).
Accommodating students' short attention spans and preference for digital medium is stupid. There are still plenty of professors out there who demand hand-written essays and quizzes. My own daughter is having to do that with some of her profs.
What's more, software is so fiendishly clever and hard to police that requiring students to bring in their own laptops is fraught with risks.
Go back to pencils and paper tests, make everyone aspire to the same challenge, and the cream will rise to the top. Not everyone is college material nor should everyone feel entitled to attend college. Nor should it be seen as the only pathway to a comfortable living.
Big Academia, including the College Board, has lost the faith of a growing number of Americans through its deceptive and insidious radical politicalization of education. At every step they have obfuscated their actions with benign-sounding terminology and nomenclature that disguised the reality of their objectives. Consequently, it is reasonable to view the new SAT with suspicion and skepticism. Is it purely an improved assessment tool or the vehicle for an unstated agenda? Unfortunately, our ability to assess its true impact is handicapped out of the gate. What academic psychometrician wants his name on a paper that will evaluate this new test if the results of that assessment are politically incorrect?
My son just took the March digital SAT & dropped 200 points from the last December paper exam. Yes 200!
Thank gd he has the first score under his belt. His goal was to improve his English score- of 4 sections he did great on 3 but bizarrely bombed 1 section bringing the total way down - something looks off but he will not be retaking it. Note in our large high performing public school there is no “test optional”, that only works for the kids that fit a college’s institutional priorities
The changes seem to make it easier. Shorter, fewer, adaptive? The idea is to separate the “men from the boys” (sorry ladies, just an expression). What is the point of such a test if everyone gets the same score?
Only well educated people can be truly free... Efforts at reducing standards, eroding expectations and destroying families are not "progressive". They are little more than efforts to introduce a caste system into the United States that would put medieval India to shame... In 100 years America will be divided into 3 distinct groups... the elite, the stupid and the woefully stupid...
The College Board, which makes the SAT, really fooled conservatives that believe in merit for college admissions. Now, they will continue to rake in billions in tax payer funding with a new test that has little to do with merit, while indoctring kids with leftist ideology via their tax payer funded AP curriculum that's taught in most schools around the country.
Bring back the old SAT no essay section . 1800 is perfect and it works . If u do not do well u know what extra classes should be taken before paying college expenses.
It’s good for all students to know if they r prepared for college and where their weaknesses lie. It saves parents and students money!
Every time the teacher union changes things it’s always bad . We need phonics and rote math . Everyone can learn this way . Also , stop catering to the stupid :bring students up to and beyond expectations. I taught and if students believe they can do amazing things .
I'm skeptical, given the shortened time and the elimination of longer essays. There just isn't enough material to accurately pigeon-hole someone - wrong answers earlier in the test will have far more effect on the score than ones designed to assess where you are within a subset.
New strategies will emerge with far more impact on the end result, and that will give wealthier families access to even more improvement from better training.
Add to that the simple loss of a whopping 26% of the test time and they might as well just admit that what they're shooting for is simply a way to weed out the bottom test-takers without impacting the so-called social justice aspect of admissions.
I'm sure the universities worked carefully with the college board to get what they wanted - an easier test and the ability to continue trying to assemble a study body that can more easily be indoctrinated than taught.
It is ENTIRELY unclear what they are doing and how it will be used. Will everyone get the same score, roughly, but the weaker students flagged? Or will only the “adaptive” score be known, and kids who scored well, but on easier material, be treated as equals to others?
And if admitted to elite schools based on these tests, will they be allowed to fail? Or will they just be given good grades? Will plagiarism, etc. be tolerated in order to give the illusion of competence? The epidemic of plagiarism involving current highly placed black females in academia does not bode well.
The GRE has been using computer adaptive tests for almost 25 years. The statistics are sound, and no kid getting 1500 should waste half an hour proving that he can do arithmetic perfectly over and over again. I am concerned with the bring your laptop part of it, as I'm sure people will figure out how to cheat
The College Board knows that an easier test with rising scores for minorities means more schools require it, more people take it, and they can claim that it is "fair."
The test has been getting easier for a long time now and the trend is only likely to accelerate. That's because the goal is not to accurately assess applicants. Instead, it's to continue to champion "diversity" while Asian-American and white kids engage in a hunger games to secure fewer and fewer spots at the most competitive colleges.
Meanwhile, these most competitive colleges have extensive tutoring services for unqualified admits who go on to resent their peers.
The biggest fix required for academic integrity - offer the test as a choice for "timed" or "extra time". And report that choice to the colleges.
The most obvious form of academic dishonesty concerning standardized tests is unreported extra time. And the colleges are equally guilty. Colleges are incentivized not to distinguish between tests taken with time vs 50% extra time. These inflated scores will then improve the overall scores that colleges report as their testing averages. Currently, the admissions office receives no information regarding test time as part of the college application...in order to protect the applicants medical privacy. When the number of untimed test takers is so high, there is hardly a stigma. And therefore hardly a reason to protect the medical privacy.
Extra time is offered to students who are diagnosed with anxiety, ADHD, or other disabilities. Unsurprisingly, the wealthier the student, the more access to a doctor who will provide that diagnosis. Some reasons for extra time are with merit - as my daughter's intelligent classmate with cerebral palsy certainly needed the extra time. But for the most part, these reasons for extra time are acquired through subjective testing from psychiatrists who are also incentivized to positively present a disability diagnosis. There is no bloodwork or ct scan or any definitive medical test to diagnose so many disabilities, and so it's a system that can easily be manipulated. Extra time is the cheater's loophole.
My daughter attends a high school with students along a wide socio-economic range. The wealthier the student, the more likely that their tests are arranged with extra time (school tests, standardized tests and even AP tests). Exactly half the students in her AP Calculus class receive extra time.
An alarming number of honors students (I'd love the statistic) take standardized tests with extra time at the public and private high schools nearby. At my daughter's school, more than one classmate is a National Merit Finalist, receiving extra time advantage. These classmates are nationally recognized for academic achievements as elite students. Though in the classroom, it's a different story. One of her classmates relies on her testing advantage - to complete tests after taking a break and sometimes finishing the following day. How is that even a test?? Needless to say, this student studies far less than others who must complete their work before the bell rings.
My daughter scored in the mid-1400's on the SAT, running out of time and guessing on the last problems. She took a few practice tests to prepare, and on the untimed tests, she's scored in the mid-1500's. If we were cheaters and her classmates played it fair, my daughter could have been the national merit finalist instead.
I'm pretty sure the SAT has been getting easier for years. 35 years ago, perfect scores of 1600 were extemely uncommon, now it seems every school district of any size has at least one every year.
Although I agree that something has gone terribly wrong with College Board and the SAT, the implication that the test is "easier" is wrongheaded. It's a standardized test, one that essentially produces a Gaussian curve. 1% of test-takers will score in the top 1% on the new Digital Test, just like the older paper test. If you are anxious about more students getting perfect scores, worry about the ACT--the number of students earning perfect scores has increased exponentially because that test's "DNA" and underlying assumptions are very different from the SAT.
The problem with the new Digital SAT isn't that it's "easy" (as one comment notes, her son "dropped 200 points" on the new Digital SAT) but rather that it may be irrelevant. The new Digital SAT doesn't have reading passages anymore, just single paragraphs followed by a single question. It's as if it were designed by TikTok. The difficulty now primarily derives from a brutal scale and distractors.
The author and nearly everyone writing about the SAT/ACT also seems to misunderstand a key element of "test-optional" admissions: they were never really optional. The author suggests that in 2019 he couldn't have known that these tests would soon not be "necessary"--but the data shows that the majority of accepted students submitted scores, even in the midst of COVID and that students who submitted scores--even scores below an institution's average--were accepted at a much higher rate than those who didn't submit. Purdue accepted only 3% of last year's class without scores. Unless you fit into a very special category, the SAT/ACT was never really optional.
To understand how Ivy-level American universities admit students you need to read Pierre Bourdieu, rather than Michel Foucault, and brush up on Castiglione's The Courtier, which advises aspirants who wish to navigate an aristocratic, courtly world in which those with power rarely mean what they say. It is puzzling that so few journalists seem willing to ask how institutions that don't share their $40 billion-dollar endowments even with their own students can serve "equity," or how Ivy League campuses that reject 95% of qualified applicants (and seek to reject 96% in the coming year, thus improving their "selectivity") can somehow embody "inclusion." The floating signifiers of "equity" and "inclusion" today primarily gain their meaning within structures of power that would be familiar to Sir Philip Sidney.
I fail to see how "adaptive" testing is superior to the old way. What's more, the College Board has already been dumbing down the SAT test for decades now; a double 800 is not the intellectual achievement it was in the 1970s (back when I took it and barely managed double 700s).
Accommodating students' short attention spans and preference for digital medium is stupid. There are still plenty of professors out there who demand hand-written essays and quizzes. My own daughter is having to do that with some of her profs.
What's more, software is so fiendishly clever and hard to police that requiring students to bring in their own laptops is fraught with risks.
Go back to pencils and paper tests, make everyone aspire to the same challenge, and the cream will rise to the top. Not everyone is college material nor should everyone feel entitled to attend college. Nor should it be seen as the only pathway to a comfortable living.
Big Academia, including the College Board, has lost the faith of a growing number of Americans through its deceptive and insidious radical politicalization of education. At every step they have obfuscated their actions with benign-sounding terminology and nomenclature that disguised the reality of their objectives. Consequently, it is reasonable to view the new SAT with suspicion and skepticism. Is it purely an improved assessment tool or the vehicle for an unstated agenda? Unfortunately, our ability to assess its true impact is handicapped out of the gate. What academic psychometrician wants his name on a paper that will evaluate this new test if the results of that assessment are politically incorrect?
Everybody gets a 1600! Yay!
My son just took the March digital SAT & dropped 200 points from the last December paper exam. Yes 200!
Thank gd he has the first score under his belt. His goal was to improve his English score- of 4 sections he did great on 3 but bizarrely bombed 1 section bringing the total way down - something looks off but he will not be retaking it. Note in our large high performing public school there is no “test optional”, that only works for the kids that fit a college’s institutional priorities
The changes seem to make it easier. Shorter, fewer, adaptive? The idea is to separate the “men from the boys” (sorry ladies, just an expression). What is the point of such a test if everyone gets the same score?
Only well educated people can be truly free... Efforts at reducing standards, eroding expectations and destroying families are not "progressive". They are little more than efforts to introduce a caste system into the United States that would put medieval India to shame... In 100 years America will be divided into 3 distinct groups... the elite, the stupid and the woefully stupid...
The College Board, which makes the SAT, really fooled conservatives that believe in merit for college admissions. Now, they will continue to rake in billions in tax payer funding with a new test that has little to do with merit, while indoctring kids with leftist ideology via their tax payer funded AP curriculum that's taught in most schools around the country.
Bring back the old SAT no essay section . 1800 is perfect and it works . If u do not do well u know what extra classes should be taken before paying college expenses.
It’s good for all students to know if they r prepared for college and where their weaknesses lie. It saves parents and students money!
Every time the teacher union changes things it’s always bad . We need phonics and rote math . Everyone can learn this way . Also , stop catering to the stupid :bring students up to and beyond expectations. I taught and if students believe they can do amazing things .
The problem is not with adaptive testing but with total lack of transparency on how that will relate to how the test will be scored.