This time they may have fixed it.
Despite overhauling the test fewer than ten years ago, the College Board has decided to once again revamp the SAT test. The changes refocus the test on critical thinking and close reading instead of rote memorization and simple test-taking ability. Most importantly, the standards of the new test will align with those of the new Common Core curriculum currently being introduced in schools across 45 states. Though the playing field will never be perfectly flat, College Board has taken a significant step in the direction of equal opportunity. Changing the content of the SAT minimizes the value of test prep programs and the like, giving everyone a fairer shot.
Elite schools began using the SAT as a way to find qualified students from outside of the New England prep school system. Harvard started to use the SAT to find the best applicants for scholarships in 1934 and the rest of the Ivy League followed suit by the end of the thirties. From then on, the SAT became a means for the underprivileged and prep school outsiders to break into the Ivies. The formerly WASP-only Ivy League began to see large numbers of marginalized groups like Jewish Americans for the first time. In time, schools started to value SAT scores more heavily rather than prep-school attendance. This, coupled with changing racial and socioeconomic attitudes, caused classes to become at least slightly more representative of the economic spectrum.
The SAT’s reputation of promoting equity has faded since then. An entire test prep-industrial complex, valued at over $1 billion, has developed around the SAT. In order to maximize the chances of getting a high score on the exam, wealthy families send their children to test prep courses or hire private tutors. Naturally, this does not come cheap. Some classes, promising to improve scores by hundreds of points, can cost as much as $1,700 in New York City. Despite some debate, these prep courses do improve scores. This eliminates any possibility of most Americans affording these top shelf courses, undermining the entire premise of the exam: meritocracy. Test results bear out this fact as well. Rather than predicting college readiness, score on the old SAT was more of a function of family wealth than anything else. Scores increased in every income quintile.
Moreover, the old SAT does not even fulfill its mandate of showing college readiness. In fact, individual scores on the old SAT do not provide much indication of a student’s college performance. Instead, a school’s average SAT score predicts college performance much more than individual scores. Therefore, the very measure meant to account for differences between schools only mirrors those same differences. Accounting for everything, the old SAT not only limits the meritocratic quality of college admissions but also amplifies differences between school qualities.
The new SAT seeks to change this dynamic. The shift to emphasizing critical thinking undergirds all of the changes to the exam. The test will also return to the 1600-point scale and make the essay component optional. Vocabulary on the test will now revolve around what the Atlantic described as, ”widely used in college and career.” Moving away from esoteric (es·o·ter·ic: meaning obscure) vocabulary words and deducting points for wrong answers minimizes the need for test aids. When the test does not require as much strategy, strategic aids lose their value. Moreover, now that the test limits the amount of mathematical topics on the exam, disadvantaged students who do not have as sophisticated mathematic educations will not find themselves behind the 8-ball. The College Board wants the exam to fulfill its primary functions: show the college readiness of students and provide an unweighted metric to compare applicants. Narrowing the content matter will do a better job of this. Looking at the new content of the exam only bolsters this point.
College Board has decided to use the Common Core as the basis of the exam. Above all else, this single change will go the farthest to ensure equal opportunity. As do all educational reforms, the Common Core has its critics, but it does significantly standardize the country’s academic standards. Like the new SAT, the Common Core concentrates on critical thinking and close reading. The test, for example, would ask students to identifying inconsistencies between interconnected text and data or analyzing a document like they would in class. Though many private and Catholic schools have decided not to adopt the Common Core, the majority of public school students will grow up on this curriculum going forward: the curriculum on which the new SAT is based. When these students take the SAT, it will no longer have the same level of remoteness. Instead, it will feel something like the high school final they have spent years preparing for. For the students who do not have the benefit of attending prep programs or private schools, this proves invaluable.
This will not entirely change the SAT test taking dynamic. Affluence, and with it the ability to hire expensive tutors and private schooling, will always offer at least a slight advantage over public schooling. Even though the structure of the test has changed and the subject matter has contracted, the test can still be taught. Test prep companies will find a way to angle their services. In fact, the College Board has started a partnership with the Khan Academy, a free online tutoring service, to provide test prep for those that cannot afford it. But this only concedes the fact that test prep can help. Making prep available for everyone will help in the search for equality, but it will not completely close the achievement gap between the wealthy and everyone else.
Wealthy students will always have an edge. In some ways, the achievement gap between the wealthy and everyone else will not dissipate because of the new SAT. Students that go to elite private and prep school will always have at least a slight edge in the college admissions process. Whether due to access to superior schooling at an early age or education through osmosis at the dinner table, the children from affluent families tend to do better academically than other students. The old SAT, however, only exacerbated this problem. By lending itself so easily to test prep programs, tutoring, and the like, the old SAT gave wealthy students another metric weighted in their favor. The new SAT hopes to rectify the situation by creating as equitable a system as possible.
But that is not the goal of the test revamp, which targets the achievement gap and fits into a larger context of education reform. The reform makes the SAT more relevant to the education the majority of students receive. This will give them far more than a puncher’s chance to succeed. In short, the College Board may have succeeded in closing the achievement gap in a way that everyone will like: by sustaining the upper bound and raising the floor. Differences between the qualities of schools will still show up in SAT scores, but the College Board can do little to avoid this. Congress and the states have the task of creating school parity; colleges and the College Board must operate in the world that already exist. Though not enough time has passed for full evaluation, this reform gives real reason for optimism.