Area students to have first crack at new SAT
Updated test with essay to debut Saturday
by Michelle Maitre, Staff Writer
Fremont Argus, March 11, 2005

Maybe they're guinea pigs or maybe they're trailblazers, but tens of thousands of high school students across the nation will be the first to test-drive the new version of the SAT when it debuts Saturday.

The anticipated new test is longer, more expensive and, some say, a better measure of the skills students need to succeed in college.

The test includes more advanced mathematics and grammar questions and, for the first time, an essay that students must write in 25 minutes.

Gone are the dreaded analogies (clay is to potter as stone is to sculptor) and quantitative comparisons. In their place are short, critical reading passages and questions in Algebra II, such as radical equations and problems involving negative exponents.

Test length jumped from three hours to three hours and 45 minutes, and the maximum score is now 2400, up from 1600. Cost is also up — to $41.50 from $29.50.

The path to the changes started in 2001, when Richard Atkinson, then president of the University of California, threatened to drop the SAT from admissions decisions, charging it was not an adequate measure of students' abilities.

While the change has sparked a new anxiety among high school students across the nation, Atkinson says students — and their schools — will be better off for the improvements.

"It really now sends a message to young people, their families and their teachers that you've got to learn to write," said Atkinson, who retired in 2003. "As soon as the College Board announced they were changing and described the essay, the schools have really been focused on writing. It's amazing how much change there's been in high schools because of the SAT."

The new version also will be fairer to low-income and minority students, who typically have fared worse than their white counterparts on the test, Atkinson said. "Minority students are now going to understand more clearly what's expected of them," he said.

Not everyone agrees. Some charge schools have been too slow to respond to the changes and it puts some students at risk of a lower score because they lack the basic training in grammar the new test requires. Students who cannot afford test preparation classes will be especially hurt, critics say.

Still, Cheri Block Sabraw, director of Mill Creek Academy, a test preparation and academic tutoring business in Fremont, said the new test focuses on core skills that will help students succeed in the long run.

"Kids want to strengthen their grammar knowledge and practice 20-to-25-minute short essays," Sabraw said. "Those skills transfer back into the classroom and core academic strengths."

The change also has been good for her business. Sabraw says more and more students and their parents are seeking out her services. The academy serves about 100 students in 11 different SAT prep classes, and Sabraw guesses she easily could fill twice that many classes if she offered them.

More than 330,000 students across the nation signed up to take the first version of the test, down about 12 percent from the 370,000 students who took the old version — without an essay — last March.

Caren Scoropanos, a spokeswoman for the nonprofit College Board, which administers the SAT, said the decrease is similar to one in 1994, the last time the SAT changed.

She contributes some of the decrease to an earlier test date this year but also to fears over the new format.

"We expect the numbers to go back up in May or June," the next testing dates  for the national examination, she said. More than 2 million students eventually will take the test this year.

As anxious as students may be over the essay, Scoropanos says it's only one-ninth of a student's overall score. The multiple-choice short writing is worth far more, she said.

"It's not supposed to be a polished essay," Scoropanos said. "It's more similar to the on-demand writing students would do in (a college course). It's not going to be graded on spelling or grammar or handwriting."

Hundreds of universities and colleges across the nation will require students to submit scores from the new test in order to be considered for admission in fall 2006. One of the largest of those is UC, which also will require students to submit scores from additional two subject-specific SAT II tests.

Richard Black, associate vice chancellor for admissions at UC Berkeley, said officials still are trying to determine exactly how they'll factor the new SAT scores into admissions decisions. In UC Berkeley's comprehensive review admissions process, SAT scores carry far less weight than a student's grades in high school, their course load or scores on the SAT IIs.

"We haven't seen the scores from the first (new SAT) yet," Black said. "We'll be working with this throughout the summer and into the fall ... and that's one of the questions we'll answer."