12/14/04 — The College Board has made major changes to the SAT, and students getting ready to apply to college — along with high school guidance departments and private tutoring companies — are scrambling to prepare.
Beginning in March, the Scholastic Assessment Test will have a stronger mathematics component, including material from Algebra II, and a verbal section with more reading passages, more grammar and usage questions, but no analogies.
The biggest change, however, is a new essay requirement. Students will be given 25 minutes to write an essay on the spot in their own handwriting.
To accommodate these modifications, the exam will take three hours and 45 minutes instead of three hours, and a perfect score will be 2,400 points instead of 1,600.
About 80 percent of the nation’s colleges use SAT scores in their admissions process.
College-bound students will have the option of taking the new test or the old test this spring, but next fall the old test will be gone.
The new SAT requires students to concentrate for a longer time, says John Zeitlin, general manager of Kaplan Test Prep and Admissions, a division of Kaplan Inc.
“The new 25-minute essay will be an exercise in keeping calm and writing in an organized fashion,” Zeitlin told the Chicago Sun-Times. “The writing multiple-choice sections will pose a challenge to students who haven’t studied formal grammar rules.”
The College Board, which owns the SAT, says it made the changes “to improve the alignment of the test with current curriculum and institutional practices in high school and college.” The new writing assignment “will help colleges make better admissions and placement decisions [and] reinforce the importance of writing throughout a student’s education.”
More than 1.4 million students took the SAT last year. Nearly 1.2 million students, took the competing college entrance test, the ACT, which is also changing.
Beginning in February, a 30-minute writing test will be added to the ACT as an optional component for college-bound students.
Some experts have expressed concern that the new writing sections on both exams will put non-native English speaking students, who haven’t had as much time to master grammar and idiomatic expressions, at a greater disadvantage.
The changes have made preparation more crucial than ever, and while students are worried, test prep companies are thrilled.
“The change could not be a better gift for us as a company,” says Jeff Rubenstein, head of research at Princeton Review, who notes that writing and grammar are “very coachable.” The company has doubled its average score improvement guarantee to 200 points.
Recently, Princeton Review received more than 14,500 practice essays for the new SAT when it offered free grading and feedback during a three-day promotion.
According to the company, most of the essays received scores between 6 (inadequate) and 8 (competent but not outstanding) out of a possible 12 points.