The test's makeover will be the first overhaul since 2005. SAT revamps to thwart prep firms

The College Board said Wednesday it plans to radically revamp the SAT — with the goal of putting SAT test prep companies out of business and aligning the test to the Common Core academic standards.

The new SAT, which will debut in 2016, will do away with trick questions, obscure vocabulary words and dizzying array of math topics that have tormented high school students for decades. It’s designed to be more focused, more transparent and more closely tied to the work students do everyday in their classrooms. It will require students to wrestle with articles on science and history and with charts and graphs of real-world data.


And the essay — a close analysis of a reading passage — will be optional.

“We aim to offer worthy challenges, not artificial obstacles,” said David Coleman, president of the College Board.

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The overhaul reflects deep concern — among students, parents, teachers and college admissions officers — that the SAT did not fairly reflect the work teenagers did in school. It stems as well from a concern that the proliferation of pricey SAT tutoring services gave the wealthy a leg up over the meritorious.

“We need to get rid of the sense of mystery and dismantle the advantages that people perceive in using costly test preparation to find out the ‘secrets of the SAT,’” Coleman said.

In a step toward that goal, Coleman announced a partnership with Khan Academy to provide free, online test prep materials — including thousands of practice problems and instructional videos. The College Board plans to train tutors and counselors to help students from low-income households to access the online test prep.

Sal Khan, founder of the online learning academy, said the added resources would “level the playing field.”

Anti-testing group National Center for Fair & Open Testing, which has labeled the role of high-priced tutoring even before Coleman’s announcement at the SXSWedu conference in Austin one its “historic flaws,” wasn’t placated once the announcement became official.

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“The partnership with the Khan Academy is unlikely to make a dent in the huge market for high-priced, personalized SAT workshops and tutoring that only well-to-do families can afford,” Public Education Director Bob Schaeffer said. “Like most of the other College Board initiatives announced today, this move is less significant than its promoters claim.”

And if anything, the partnership with Khan Academy indicates that test preparation works, said Seppy Basili, a vice president at Kaplan Test Prep.

Coleman likened students to athletes practicing before a game, but Basili said they are on the practice field with a coterie of coaches. “That is exactly what people will look for from companies like Kaplan: getting an edge.”

Test prep firm Princeton Review said the College Board’s announcement means “the industry is going to undergo some upheaval,” Senior Vice President Paul Kanarek said.

But because Princeton Review’s strategy has always been to teach testing techniques and methodology, not content, the company is “gloriously positioned” to keep commanding customers.

When the makeover for the college entrance exam takes effect, it will be the first overhaul since 2005.

The changes come at a challenging time for the College Board, a nonprofit that brings in more than $750 million a year, mostly from the SAT, SAT subject tests and Advanced Placement exams.

The percentage of SAT test takers who hit the College Board’s benchmark for college readiness has been flat, at 43 percent, for the past five years.

More than 800 colleges and universities have made it optional for students to submit SAT or ACT scores.

And a new study released last month by the National Association for College Admission Counseling found that students who are admitted to college without submitting SAT or ACT scores do just as well as their peers in terms of college grades and graduation rates.

Meanwhile, the SAT has been contending with a surge in popularity for its rival, the ACT, which tests in science as well as math and reading, requires students to know fewer arcane vocabulary words and has a reputation for being less tricky — though not necessarily easier. In 2012, for the first time, more students took the ACT than the SAT. The shift continued last year, when 1.8 million students took the ACT and 1.7 million took the SAT.

If that’s not challenge enough, the College Board’s Coleman has been widely vilified on social media for his role in drafting the Common Core academic standards, which are rolling out this year in 45 states and the District of Columbia.Coleman was an architect of the Common Core and has worked vigorously to win over critics, even holding a two-day symposium with conservative Christians last spring to try to convince them that the standards’ emphasis on close reading would help children understand Scripture. The standards remain a flash point, drawing anger from both left and right.

The new SAT will be aligned with the Common Core — a fact that’s sure to anger home-schooling parents and private school administrators, who may now feel compelled to tailor their own curriculum to the standards so their students can do well on the SAT.

In the Wednesday announcement, the College Board was careful not to dwell on the new SAT’s alignment with the Common Core, given the controversy surrounding the standards. College Board spokeswoman Carly Lindauer noted that the new SAT is also aligned to the standards of states like Texas that have not adopted Common Core but are increasingly emphasizing close reading and textual analysis as important 21st century skills.

The revised SAT will emphasize close reading and require students to cite evidence from the text. And the texts presented for analysis will include more articles about real world topics. Every SAT will also include a passage from one of America’s founding documents, such as the Declaration of Independence or the Federalist Papers, or from a piece of writing inspired by those documents, such as Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech.

The math portion will cover fewer topics but in more depth, with a focus on linear equations and data analysis — again, connected to real-world scenarios. “No longer will the SAT have only disconnected problems, or tricky situations students won’t likely see again,” Coleman said. Calculators will be permitted only in certain sections.

As for the writing portion, Coleman has banished the dreaded sentence completion questions from the SAT. He promised the new exam will emphasize useful rather than enigmatic vocabulary, with a focus on “powerful words” that carry different meanings in different contexts, such as “synthesis” or “empirical.”

Other changes: The SAT will revert to the old 1,600-point scale, rather than the 2,400-point scale now in use. Students will no longer be penalized for guessing incorrectly. The essay will be optional. And the test will be available online and on paper. The exact length has not yet been determined, but Coleman said he expected it to be about three hours with an additional 50 minutes for the optional essay. The College Board plans to release sample items April 16.

ACT said it has no plans to revamp its college entrance exam beyond creating an online version. ACT says its exam is already aligned with the Common Core.

The changes to the SAT validate the current format and development of the ACT, said Paul Weeks, ACT vice president of customer engagement.

“We’ve long espoused relevance and openness,” Weeks said, noting ACT’s regular surveys of high school teachers about their classroom curriculum. “The reconciliation of that informs our test blueprint.”

Other parallels between the new SAT and the ACT, Weeks noted, include the optional writing section and no-penalty guessing.

Coleman also announced several other initiatives at Wednesday’s event: The College Board will send all low-income students who take the test — not just high performers — four vouchers to cover college application fees. And the board will join nonprofit and high-tech partners to launch hundreds of AP computer science, math and science courses in communities that have not historically had access to advanced science, technology, engineering and math classes.

For all his evident pride in the revamped SAT, Coleman emphasized that the test “should never be used alone to make decisions about a person’s life and future.”

The redesign should make the test better, he said, but “we must also recognize its limits.”

Nirvi Shah contributed to this report.