When high school juniors sit down to take the SAT on March 12, they will face a radically different test than today's college students took for college admission. New portions will be added to the test and other parts will be removed.
The College Board, the non-profit organization that owns and maintains the SAT, has decided to overhaul the college entrance examination. The new SAT will last three hours and 45 minutes, and consist of three sections?critical reading, math, and writing. The perfect score will be raised to 2,400 from 1,600.
Analogies will be eliminated from the section previously titled "verbal," some Algebra II will added to the math section, and the writing section will consist of a 25 minute essay and multiple-choice questions, which will ask students to identify sentence errors and improve paragraphs. The Writing SAT II will no longer exist.
Although traditionally the SAT has been considered a reasoning test, the College Board is trying to shape it to reflect what is actually being taught in high schools.
It also attempting to influence what is taught in high schools. The College Board writes on its website that it "strongly believe[s] that making the writing section required and not optional will send a strong message about the importance of writing for success in college and the workplace."
Dean of Admissions Emeritus Richard Steele, who retired in 2001 after serving as Bowdoin's Dean of Admissions for ten years, is now a consultant to the College Board. The addition of the writing section is helpful not only to the Admissions Office, but to incoming students as well, he said.
"Writing is very important to the experience at Bowdoin," Steele said, "and we knew from research at admissions that writing is important for success at Bowdoin."
The writing section and the essay have been the most scrutinized parts of the new SAT. Critics argue that the 25 minutes given will reward essays that are formulaic and bland, and that this style of writing may be then taught in schools. In addition, due to the short amount of time, students will not be able to revise and rewrite, an important component in learning how to write well.
Steele, on the other hand, said that the essay is meant to be "a sample of a rough draft that will give the Admissions Office a chance to see how a student organizes his or her thoughts."
The College Board also writes that it "recognizes that an essay written in a short amount of time will not be polished. It is just a first draft and will be scored as such. The essay will be similar to the on-demand writing required for in-class college exams."
Steele added that Bowdoin still collects two essays from every prospective student, which are examples of more formal and polished essays.
In addition to seeing how a student can organize his or her thoughts, the new essay may have other uses for colleges. Steele said he spoke to other New England colleges and that some, including St. Michael's College in Vermont, are very interested in using the essays to place students in classes to accommodate and improve their writing skills once they arrive on campus.
Another criticism that constantly plagues the SAT concerns its fairness. There has traditionally been a gap between white students' scores and minority students' scores, which is often attributed to the fact that many white students can afford the services of private tutors and tutoring agencies and that they generally attend better schools. Now that the SAT has become more of an achievement test, some worry that it will exacerbate the gap. In an effort to combat this, the College Board is working to create self-help plans so that motivated students can practice problems themselves without the aid of tutoring.
At Bowdoin the SAT has been optional for 30 years, and will continue to be optional. The Bowdoin Admissions web site reports that "20-25 percent of recent entering classes decided not to submit standardized test results." The web site is also careful not to emphasize standardized tests for evaluative purposes. Under a section listing factors that Bowdoin uses to select students, things such as "overall academic record," "overall academic potential," and "extracurricular participation" are cited, but not standardized tests. Steele said that "what students do in high school is far and away of greater importance," and that "the SAT is just a supplement."
As for how Bowdoin will use the new SAT, Dean of Admissions Jim Miller said "it will take three to four years of matching students' college performances against their SAT scores before anyone knows just how good a predictor [of academic performance in college] the new test is. So I guess the jury will be out on the value of the new test until then."