Fish
is to ocean as dog is to ... oh, never
mind
Tougher SAT
dumps analogies
Wednesday, September 01, 2004 • BY KELLY HEYBOER
•Star-Ledger Staff
Attention Class of 2006:
Forget analogies.
If you're getting ready to
take the SAT this spring, brush up on your Algebra II,
absolute values, functional notations, and negative and
fractional exponents. Practice finding errors in sentences
and rewriting paragraphs.
Above all, learn to write
a solid essay in 25 minutes.
The College Board
yesterday gave the public its first peek of the new version
of the SAT, which is to debut in March. The overhauled
college entrance exam will feature a new writing section, an
essay, more reading passages and higher- level math
questions.
Analogies (such as
"soporific is to sleep as fertilizer is to growth") are
gone. Quantitative comparisons (math questions that ask test
takers to compare or estimate numbers) also will be
eliminated.
The changes -- which will
expand the test from 3 hours to 3 hours, 45 minutes -- are
designed to make the nation's largest college entrance exam
a better predictor of how well students will do in college,
said College Board President Gaston Caperton.
"The new SAT will continue
to assess how students apply what they have learned in
school," Caperton said. "With the addition of the writing
section, it will be even more valuable in assessing the
academic skills students need to succeed in college and in
today's work force."
The College Board, a
nonprofit group that oversees the SAT, announced it would
overhaul the test in 2002 amid growing complaints that the
exam was flawed and a threat that the University of
California was planning to develop its own entrance
exam.
College Board researchers
spent the last two years trying out ideas and administering
45,000 field tests before settling on the final version,
said Photo Anagnostopoulos, the College Board's senior vice
president for product development.
"The guiding principle was
what is best for the students," she said. "We researched
this to the nth degree."
The new test will have
three parts. A new writing section, a critical reading
(formerly called verbal) section and a math section. Each
will be scored on a 200- to 800-point scale. A perfect score
will be a 2400, instead of the old 1600.
Other specifications
include:
The 25-minute essay will
always be the first question on the exam. Research showed
students did better when they got the hand- written essay
out of the way first, rather than tackling it in the middle
or at the end of the exam, College Board officials
said.
The rest of the writing
section will include 35 minutes of multiple- choice
questions in which students must identify grammatical
errors, improve poorly written sentences and rewrite
paragraphs.
In the critical reading
section, students will answer 48 questions about fictional,
narrative and scientific passages they read. They also will
answer 19 sentence completion questions.
The majority of the
questions in the 70-minute math section will still be
multiple choice. But students will have to solve and write
in the answers to 10 questions.
Students in the East and
Midwest will get a different essay question than students in
the West. That will discourage students in the East from
taking advantage of the time difference to leak the topic of
the essay to friends in California on test day, College
Board officials said.
The essay section will be
graded by an army of college professors and high school
teachers who will read the papers over the
Internet.
College Board officials
encouraged current high school seniors to take the current
version of the SAT this fall or in January. The new version,
which debuts March 12, is supposed to be for the Class of
2006. But current seniors will be permitted to take the new
test, too, if they miss earlier test dates.
Most colleges will begin
requiring the new version of the SAT for students applying
to start college in the fall of 2006.
Grayce Mei, entering her
junior year West Windsor-Plainsboro High School South, will
be among the first wave of students to take the tougher test
in the spring.
"I am a little worried but
not that much," Mei said.
She already scored 1460 on
the current SAT and took an early practice version of the
new exam. She plans to take the old test again one last
time, then sit for the new exam in the spring.
The College Board also
released yesterday SAT averages for last year's graduating
class that showed scores in New Jersey and the rest of the
nation held steady last year. The average verbal score
nationally rose a point to 508 out of a maximum of 800,
while the average math score fell a point to
518.
In New Jersey, the average
student scored a 501 on the verbal section, the same as last
year. Students averaged a 514 on the math section, one point
less than last year.
Though the average scores
for Mexican-American and Hispanic students improved
slightly, scores for women and minorities continued to fall
well below white male students.
The anti-testing group
FairTest and other SAT critics said the latest numbers
continue to prove the exam is biased and does not predict
academic success.
"The so-called 'new' SAT,
to be introduced next year, fails to address any of these
problems," said Bob Schaeffer, public education director of
the Massachusetts-based FairTest.
Staff writer Bev McCarron contributed to this report.
Copyright 2004 The Star-Ledger. Used by NJ.com with
permission.
|