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An SAT Saturday is tough enough: the sixth early-morning alarm of the week, almost four hours of test deciphering and, now, a beat-the-clock essay where you can't just guess C and hope for the best. But the real stress comes 16 days later, on SAT Monday, at 8 a.m. Eastern time--when the College Board posts results online. Students type in their passwords, total their scores on the expanded 2400-point scale and ponder a new problem: If I get, say, a 2170 or even a 2380, is this a good score? What is its counterpart on the old 1600-point scale? Is my score on the new writing portion of the test less important? And should I be considering taking the test again?
The SAT--the ordeal that's been The Most Important Test of Your Life for generations--underwent a dramatic makeover this past spring, and the impact is rattling through high schools and colleges. During its history the test has evolved into an unlikely American icon, revered for efficient sorting of young academic talent and reviled for what critics called cultural bias. The SAT's genius--brilliant or evil--was in labeling each student with a standardized, easily understood number that helped parents and colleges figure out who could hack it in the Ivy League and who was destined for community college. And, until this year, it came in a neat 1600-point package, burned into the subconscious of high-school seniors and admissions officers alike. Anything above a 1500 gave you a good shot at one of the nation's best universities. Score about half that, and you should be really, really good at football.
Now that familiar scale is gone, thanks to the writing section of the test, which had its debut in March. A perfect score--now 2400--will surely still be a ticket into some top school. But farther down the scale, there's already plenty of confusion as the first students who took the new test prepare to send off their college applications for 2006-07. Many colleges, unsure how much weight to give the writing test, will muddle through the first year or two. But eventually there will be a consensus and the SAT's barometer will steady. Who gets left in the lurch? Current high-school seniors, who are guinea pigs in a grand experiment aimed at improving high-school writing and retooling the admissions process.
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Even the College Board, which created the test, wants colleges to go slow. "We tell them not to jump into decisions about how they're going to use the essay the first year," says spokeswoman Chiara Coletti. For students figuring out where to apply, that's not so helpful. The best advice? Do your homework. When you visit schools, don't just ask whether they require the SAT writing test or the optional ACT writing test. Ask how the writing scores will be used. Will they get the same weight as math and critical reading (formerly verbal)? Or will they be treated like the old SAT writing achievement test?
Each college has its own answer. Some schools won't consider the new test at all. Some will collect the results but use them sparingly. Certain schools will compare the timed essays with those polished--perhaps Mommy-aided--essays sent with the application. Others will dive right in, using the new scores to select the class of 2010. For college counselors and students accustomed to measuring against the old order, the first years will be like switching time zones, says Sally Rubenstone, an author and former Smith College admissions officer who now works for CollegeConfidential.com. Eventually the jet lag will fade. But for now, Rubenstone says, "students and parents are at a loss to figure out what their scores really mean." So why are we doing this again?
The latest shake-up started in 2001 at the University of California, when its then president, Richard Atkinson, suggested the possibility of dropping the SAT from UC admissions criteria. He feared that the exam encouraged students to focus on SAT preparation. Wary of losing its biggest SAT customer, the College Board launched perhaps the most dramatic rewrite in test history. It added tougher math questions, axed analogies and developed the essay. The 800-point writing test includes a multiple-choice section that looks like an editing test. Students don't have to know technical grammar terms but must be able to fix bad sentences.
The essay counts for just one third of the writing score, but it's the biggest departure from the multiple-choice SAT of the past. Students get a "prompt" that lays out a topic and then asks an open-ended philosophical question. In June, for example, some students were given a paragraph explaining that many people intentionally forget their pasts to become successful, while others build their lives on personal histories. Then they were told to tackle this: "Do memories hinder or help people in their effort to learn from the past and succeed in the present?" Got that? Answer it, in 25 minutes.
The put-your-pencils-down command surprised some writers of unfinished essays, as well as prompting a few complaints, after the inaugural test in March. That's especially important because an MIT professor found that College Board samples gave more points to longer essays. But the bigger gripe of students was the sheer length of the test. That puts the College Board in a pickle, because every minute added to the essay is another minute of wearing down a 17-year-old's psyche and stamina. Officials say their experiments with extra time show it makes no difference in how students rank.
But students who nonetheless want extra writing time--five minutes of it--might want to consider taking the ACT, the curriculum-based alternative that's popular in the Midwest. It added an optional essay in February, and compared with those taking the SAT, ACT students get a topic that's more practical and familiar, like "In your opinion, should high schools begin the day several hours later in the morning?"
Mindful of the various uncertainties, many colleges will make limited use of the writing test, at least until they can match incoming students' scores with their grades in freshman English. "We have no benchmarks at this point," says Pam Horne, director of admissions at Michigan State, which requires the new SAT as well as the ACT writing portion. Although the SAT math and critical-reading sections are separate tests, many admissions offices combined the two for a composite score that effectively equalized numerical and verbal skills. But the writing test disrupts that balance. Horne says schools may be reluctant to total all three tests and work on the 2400-point scale. Some schools, like Georgetown, for now won't require the writing test at all. But many will, making it difficult for most applicants to avoid an essay.
The ACT adds a wrinkle. Because its writing portion is optional, it's drawing interest from students skittish about the new SAT, says Jennifer Karan, director of SAT and ACT programs at Kaplan Test Prep and Admissions. Students who take the ACT may have another advantage. Even with the essay, it's still 20 minutes shorter than the SAT, which clocks in at 3 hours and 45 minutes. But the morning is even longer. With registration and breaks, those SAT Saturdays are pushing five hours. The hunger pangs were so great after the March test that the College Board re-emphasized its snacking rules, encouraging students to bring in munchies for breaks. Yes, there are snacking rules. And no, they don't include ordering in pizza. Save that for your freshman dorm.
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