The New SAT: College Admissions Test Gets Major Overhaul

Don’t let the sweeping changes to the SAT exam catch your child by surprise. Here’s what the College Board has planned for the SAT: new writing and math tests, a new way of scoring and a change in how scores for students with disabilities are reported.


By Michael Mullaly, GreatSchools.net

Beginning in March 2005, a lot more students will score 1600 on the SAT. Unfortunately, the perfect score will rise to 2400 because the College Board is adding a writing test worth up to 800 points. There also will be significant changes to the verbal and mathematics sections.
America’s oldest college admission exam is being revamped for the first time since 1994, largely because the University of California threatened to drop the test as an admission requirement. The revised SAT will be more closely aligned with today’s high school curriculum and will address concerns among employers and university professors that the quality of student writing has declined.

In addition, after September 2003, the College Board will no longer disclose on score reports whether a student was allowed additional time to complete the test because of a disability.


What changes will occur in the verbal section?
What changes are being made to the math section?
What will the new SAT writing test be like?
What’s different about the score reports of students with disabilities?
What other changes are planned for the SAT?
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What changes will occur in the verbal section?
The revised SAT verbal test will include a series of paragraph-long passages, each followed by a single multiple-choice question. These will replace analogy questions, which test a student’s ability to discern the relationship between words. (One example: “attorney” is to “client” as “physician” is to ______. The correct answer is “patient.”) Despite being a rigorous test of verbal reasoning, analogies are being eliminated because they are not a part of most high school curriculums. The test will be renamed “critical reading” to reflect its new emphasis.

What changes are being made to the math section?
The revised SAT math test will contain questions that require knowledge of Algebra II-level material, including matrices, absolute values, rational equations and inequalities, radical equations and geometric notations. Most students take Algebra II during their third year of high school. The current SAT tests only concepts from Algebra I and geometry. In addition, quantitative comparison questions will no longer appear on the SAT. These test items ask students to compare two mathematical expressions and determine which represents the larger quantity.

What will the new SAT writing test be like?
The new SAT writing test will be extremely similar to the current SAT II writing exam that students applying to more selective colleges are sometimes required to take. The one-hour test will include:


An essay (for which about 20 minutes will be alloted) on an assigned, but general, topic

A multiple-choice grammar section in which students specify the part of a given sentence that contains an error

A multiple-choice syntax section in which students select the most well-constructed sentence or the best-organized paragraph from several options

Two expert readers will score each student essay on a scale of 1 to 6, with higher scores denoting better performance. A third reader will be consulted if the experts’ scores differ by more than two points. The College Board is considering making copies of the essays available to college admission offices.


What’s different about the score reports of students with disabilities?
The College Board currently flags the SAT score reports of students who were granted additional time to take the test because of a disability. This practice will cease after September 2003.

This policy has raised the concern that some parents may exaggerate the need for their children to receive testing accommodations in order to secure additional time. While this is a legitimate concern, the College Board requires parents to provide professional documentation of a medically established disability before it considers granting special accommodations.

Reasons that students may be granted accommodations on the SAT include impaired vision or hearing, attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (AD/HD), learning disabilities, physical handicaps and “certain medical conditions.” It is important to realize that there are other accommodations besides additional testing time, such as a different location or special equipment. Extra time is granted only when a student’s disability presents a direct need for additional time, or when the test is given in a nonstandard format (in Braille, for example).

If you have a child who may qualify for special accommodations, be sure to initiate the application process well in advance – ideally, during the spring before the first year in which your child intends to take an SAT test. All the necessary paperwork should be available at your child’s school. For additional information about testing accommodations, click here.

What other changes are planned for the SAT?
Because the new writing section will be scored on the same 200 to 800 scale used for the reading and math sections, the maximum SAT score will increase from 1600 to 2400. However, the College Board will calibrate the tests so that scores on the new critical reading and math sections can be directly compared to those on the current SAT verbal and math sections.

The duration of the test will increase by 30 minutes to 3½ hours. The College Board expects the price of the SAT to rise by $10 or $12 from its current cost of $26. Fee waivers will continue to be available to those who qualify.


Critics believe there is hidden agenda behind such change.