The "New" SAT: A Better Test or Just a Marketing Ploy?

In June 2002, the College Board announced a series of changes to the SAT-I that were implemented in March 2005. The action primarily responded to threats by the University of California, the SAT's biggest customer, that it planned to drop the test and to the growing number of colleges which have made test scores optional for many applicants.

None of the revisions in the test address the SAT-I's fundamental flaws such as its inaccuracy, biases, and susceptibility to coaching. In fact, some of the changes may make these problems worse. Nor has the College Board acted to crack down on widespread misuses of the SAT-I, such as requiring minimum scores for admissions or scholarships. Moreover, contrary to the marketing claims accompanying the promotion of the "new" SAT-I, the revised exam will do little to improve the quality of K-12 education.

How is the "new" SAT-I different from the previous test?

The general format and content of the "new" SAT-I is largely unchanged. It is still primarily multiple-choice and administered under strictly timed conditions. The SAT-Verbal has been renamed "Critical Reading" and includes additional short Reading Comprehension passages in place of the much-criticized verbal Analogies. The math section now contains some Algebra II questions (it formerly covered only Algebra I and geometry), and the arcane Quantitative Comparison items were removed.

Responding to criticism about the SAT-I being far removed from classroom learning, the College Board added a so-called "Writing" component. The new section is modeled on the SAT II: Writing Test, previously an optional exam with such weak predictive value that it was required by fewer than 100 colleges nationally. The SAT-I "Writing" test includes 35 minutes of multiple-choice, copy editing questions with the remaining 25 minutes allotted for drafting one, short essay. Each section is still graded on a 200 to 800 point scale, so the addition of the third section bumps up a "perfect" SAT-I score to 2400. The total testing time rises from 3 hours to 3 3/4 hours. These changes were accompanied by a cost increase of $12 per test-taker, boosting the College Board's revenues by more than $30 million a year.

Will the "new" SAT-I predict college grades more accurately than the old test did?

College Board technical reports acknowledge that a student's high school grades and courses taken provide a better forecast of college performance than the SAT-I does. Historically the test did a particularly poor job of predicting how females, students of color, and older test-takers will perform in college. Since the revised SAT-I has not yet been used in the admissions process, there is no research demonstrating how the test's predictive validity will be affected by the changes. However, several sources of information do provide clues about likely impacts.

With the exception of the added writing component, the "new" SAT-I closely resembles the prior test in form and content. This means it will likely remain a weak predictor of college grades and bachelor degree attainment. Although the exam's predictive validity may increase slightly due to the addition of a third section (forecasting accuracy tends to rise with each additional test score), this improvement will probably not be substantial nor be equal across all demographic groups.

College Board reports on the Test of Standard Written English (TSWE) it administered as part of the SAT prior to 1994 and the English Composition Achievement Test (ECT), which together were the prototypes for the current SAT II: Writing Test, call into question the predictive power of the "new" SAT-I writing section. This research shows that the TSWE and ECT did a particularly poor job of forecasting the college performance of African American students and students whose strongest language was not English. In fact, the TSWE was removed from the SAT in the early 1990s because the College Board recognized that it was not a useful tool in the college admissions process.