SAT

What the SATs Mean to You?

The tests have changed, and so has the scoring system

Three letters – S.A. and T. - strung together form an acronym that manages to strike terror in the hearts of students and parents alike. The SAT, revised and and renamed in a number of occasions, the Scholastic Assessment Test (the A used to stand for aptitude), is the most widely used college entrance exam in the United States, with over one million high school students taking it in one year.

The point of the SAT, its defenders maintain, is to predict a student's future college performance by testing reasoning skills in both verbal and mathematical areas. Unlike many other standardized tests, the SAT purportedly measures a student's potential for academic work rather than solely assessing knowledge already learned.

Critics claim, however, that the SAT does not measure skills so much as knowledge, and that knowledge is not a fair indication of future academic performance. Others contend that the SAT's method of assessing skills is inherently biased and unfair. What is indisputable is that the SAT is one of the key factors used by colleges and universities in making admissions decisions, and that a low SAT average can mean the difference between getting into the school you want and an also-ran.

To quiet critics, the exam's sponsor, the College Entrance Examination Board, working with the test's creator, the Educational Testing Service, undertook a major overhaul of the exams in various occasions. The test was changed in name, format, content, scoring...

Everything has changed. Photo by Elena.

The revisions came after years of extensive research and field testing, according the College Board. The revised SAT recognizes the increased diversity of students in the education system, as well as changes in how and what these students are being taught in secondary school.

The new reading comprehension section contains longer passages with more emphasis on analysis, and the revised math questions demand that students write their answers on a grid rather than pick a multiple choice answer. The scoring system was recalibrated as well. The purpose of the re-centering of test scores was to bring the average score for each section back to 500, which was the average when the scoring method was devised in 1941. Over the past decades, average scores have dropped to the low of mid-400s.

The recalibrating means that by answering the same number of questions correctly, the average student will get approximately 80 extra points on the verbal section and 20 extra points on the math section. As in the past, 1600 remains the perfect score for the math and verbal components combined.

The grade inflation caused by the resetting of the scale is, of course, no secret to college admissions offices. Rather than increasing an individual's chance of being accepted by a school known for expecting high test scores, the revised scoring is supposed to give those who take the exam a better indication of how they did compared to others. If, for example, a student gets a 510 on the verbal exam, she will know that she scored a little above average.

How accurate is the test in predicting academic success? It depends. Some schools, such as Brown University, report that they have observed no marked correlation between scores and academic performance. At Harvard University, where the average combined SAT score is 1400, officials indicate that SAT scores art typically well correlated to academic performance, particularly during the freshman year.

But it is a mistake to make too much of SAT scores, warn many experts in admissions. For a clearer picture of future academic success, it's essential to look at a bigger picture, which includes a student's high school grades, class rank, and extracurricular activities.