Recently, The College Board has made content changes to the Scholastic Assessment Tests (SAT) to make the test more relevant to the content students learn in the classroom. The first month that the revamped SAT will be available for students to take is March of 2016.
“Students will no longer be questioned on obscure vocabulary, and now the test requires students to cite answers for some of the questions,” Guidance Counselor Kaitlyn Richter said.
Changes to the test are evident in multiple areas: The reading has changed from critical reading to evidence based reading, there is now writing and language, the test scoring has reverted to 1600 point scale, and they have eliminated point reduction for wrong answers.
Part of the reason the test changed is because there were so many “tricks” in the questions of the SAT. Students began to memorize the tricks within the SAT through prep classes, which wasn’t truly showing if they were college ready, which is the purpose of both the ACT (American College Test) and the SAT.
“One of the reasons the College Board revamped the SAT is to relate the questions back to what students are learning in the classroom,” Richter said.
Richter, and the other guidance counselors of McNick, suggest that students take both the ACT and the SAT, and continue taking the test they scored better on. Richter also said that students should take the ACT with writing at least one time because schools want to see that score.
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