How The Pandemic Remade the SAT

Learn about the changes made to the new digital SAT

If you're having a digital test, then you should be able to take it at home on your laptop, right? But if you have to go someplace and take it on their laptop, then you might as well take a paper test - especially if your reading comprehension and ability to do math is going to be lower anyway!

The article in the New Yorker about the new digital SAT and its genesis was one of the first to give us comprehensive information about the new digital SAT.

As you likely remember, the College Board announced they were going to give a digital SAT in December 2020 and then walked away from it, in large part because of the huge AP test snafu where students’ tests weren’t saved when they uploaded them, and so they were asked to re-take the tests. 

The College Board got a lot of flack for that - they were subject to a massive class-action lawsuit that eventually went to arbitration (Henn, 2020) - and now are planning to roll out a digital SAT in 2024, two years from now.

Potential issues with the switch from physical to digital SATs

I’m worried about a few things that may happen with a digital SAT:

[1] Reading online: We know that reading comprehension is significantly lower on a screen than it is on a piece of paper. Students from underserved schools already struggle with reading comprehension, and don’t need another barrier to their comprehension.

[2] Doing math online/on a calculator without needing to write anything down: My students already have trouble with fundamental number sense, so that when they do a problem that’s in the thousands and get an answer like “3”, they may not realize that that’s not a likely/possible answer to a problem of that magnitude. My students also see the calculator as a solution to math in which if you input numbers, you can assume that the calculator’s solution is correct - they often lose the thread of what they’ve been asked to do as the calculator becomes another barrier between critical thinking and the output of the problem.  For example, if I were to ask, “What’s 11 x 45?”, most people would ballpark that answer in their heads: 

  • 11 x 45 is pretty close to 10 x 45

  • 10 x 45 = 450

  • The answer has to be more than 450, because 11 is more than 10

  • The answer must be a 3-digit number

  • If you somehow got “3” as an answer, you would know immediately and intuitively it is wrong.  

My students often don’t run through that logic loop, and making the test a space that’s less physically tangible and more theoretical (paper-based vs computer-based test) means that they are further from those things that will keep them on track.  
I’m worried about giving kids a test that doesn’t force them to use scrap paper: they won’t have the opportunity to write anything down. This is actually a hindrance: what we’ve found with the kids that we work with is that the more they write down, the more their scores go up. We know there’s a correlation there. We also know that marking things up – especially for students who are struggling with lower levels of literacy than they should be at their level – makes a dramatic impact in their score increase. The fact that my kids can’t do the things that help them the most - that’s a real scary prospect. We’re taking away the supports that our students have – and need – currently, and we’re giving them a medium in which we know their comprehension and ability to use the tools effectively is lower.

[3] The difficulty of adaptive tests: The new SAT will be like a GRE, where if you don't get a high enough score on the first passage, you can’t get to the harder second passage. For example, let’s say that the threshold for getting to the hard second passages is a 10 on the first passage, and I got a 9. I am now barred from the hard second passage, which means there’s no access to the higher score area.

[4] Only one question: One aspect of the test that they mentioned in the New Yorker article is that you’re given several passages to read and one question to answer about them. This is potentially troublesome: that one question could either be about a small detail, or it could be about a main idea, and if you didn’t understand the passages to begin with, either option could end up being prohibitively difficult.

[5] Sense of importance that gets higher scores: The author of this article took the new SAT and mentioned that it was easier. This makes sense: it’s shorter, and it’s on a computer. It’s impossible to feel the full “weight” of the test. I’d argue that you should feel like the test is weighty; it’s an extremely important test, and we’ve found with kids who’ve taken the test that this weight - the knowledge is that “this really counts” - makes them get tangibly higher scores. Yes, there's also test anxiety - but we find that students are generally more helped than hindered by this “actual test weight”: There is usually a significant increase between the last practice tests they took with us and their actual score on the College Board test.
According to this article, a College Board employee said that the new test maintains the same level of complexity, and that the same number of students are getting the questions right and wrong. I’d be curious to see those statistics.

Challenges facing students from underserved schools

I’m really worried about the digital SAT. I would like to see samples beforehand so that I know what the problems are going to be and how I can get ready for those problems (like in a boxing match - I need to understand where the next punch is coming from). I would like to understand both how students are doing on it relative to how they were doing on the old tests and where people are getting things right and wrong differently. As you know, our current SAT concept indexing system takes into account every concept that’s ever been tested on any version of the SAT that’s been released/is available. We have identified what’s tested, frequency, co-occurring concepts, difficulty curves, and how each of those factors interacts with another.

If we don’t have a sense of what concepts kids are getting wrong and the ways that they’re getting them wrong, then this test becomes a black box that’s a lot harder for our students to figure out how to succeed on. And you might be thinking, “Alyssa, what you’re saying is you can’t game the test - and you shouldn’t.”   

Fair - but high-SES students WILL be able to game the test. So I want the same advantage for my students, who are already fighting to overcome the disadvantage of being from underserved schools, and thus not having been given great fundamentals on which to build.

Students from underserved schools are not going to do well if they’re not given some support - and I KNOW that high income parents are going to find tutors who will help those kids figure out how to game this test. There’s nothing I can do about that - but what I CAN do is level the playing field, and figure out how to game the test for MY students, too.

Here’s another thought to consider: if you are giving students a concrete strategy that is useful to them in ways outside just the SAT or ACT, that is tangibly linked with better salary and success outcomes, can that really be considered gaming the test? For example, higher order thinking skills include the ability to zoom out and have a holistic understanding of what’s being discussed. Doing that will help you on the SAT - but it’s also a skill that’s measurable as a critical thinking skill and one that will help you in high school, in college, and in life. When test prep becomes amassing knowledge that’s actually measurably helpful, then it calls into the question the phrase “gaming” or “teaching to the test”: If the test is testing things that are useful, and our approach to teaching those particular concepts is helping our students think in ways that we know are positive predictors of success (critical thinking skills are specifically tied to better outcomes in high school graduation, college graduation, salary after college graduation, and happiness in life), that feels much less like “teaching to the test” and far more like the actual essence of education.

I think we need to reevaluate the idea of “gaming the test”, and I also need more information about the new test so that I can make sure our strategies help my students succeed - both to level the playing field and to help them be more successful TO and THROUGH college.

Are SATs a detractor to BIPOC acceptance?

And if you’re thinking “SATs are actually a detractor from BIPOC acceptance onto college campuses”, I will share the following three pieces of information:

  • “One study published in 2021 found that the share of Black, Latino and Native American students increased by only 1 percentage point at about 100 colleges and universities that adopted the policy between 2005-06 and 2015-16.” (Barshay, 2022)

  • A separate study of a group of selective liberal arts colleges that adopted test-optional policies before 2011 didn’t find any diversity improvements on those campuses. (Barshay, 2022)

  • From MIT: [S]tandardized tests also help us identify academically prepared, socioeconomically disadvantaged students who could not otherwise demonstrate readiness⁠ because they do not attend schools that offer advanced coursework, cannot afford expensive enrichment opportunities, cannot expect lengthy letters of recommendation from their overburdened teachers, or are otherwise hampered by educational inequalities.⁠ By using the tests as a tool⁠ in the service of our mission, we have helped improve the diversity of our undergraduate population. (Schmill, 2022)⁠ 

What’s crazy is that all the people who want to make college admissions fairer are actually pushing admissions offices to use barometers that more drastically favor wealthy and white candidates - because without SATs, they have to use SOMETHING.

Learn a few tricks for evaluating your reading comprehension skills!

Worried about how you might do on the new SAT? 

  • Read some articles online

  • Ask yourself questions about what you read

  • Go back to figure out if you were correct

  • If you weren’t correct, figure out why that is. 

    • Did your eyeballs skip a couple of lines? 

    • Is it because when you read online, you only look at the first and last sentence and miss the middle section? 

    • Is it that you just don’t fully encode the things you’ve read? 

  • If you can figure out why that's happening for you, then it will help you increase your comprehension on the reading section of the SAT.

Remember that the past is the best predictor of future performance and that an apple a day keeps the doctor very smart - so keep your skills sharp and they will be there with you when you take the test!

Stay tuned for my next video - about a deep dive into college admissions and how the SAT actually made them fairer, especially to low-SES, BIPOC, and first-generation college students!

References

Barshay, J. (2022, October 17). PROOF POINTS: Colleges that ditched test scores for admissions find it's harder to be fair in choosing students, researcher says. The Hechinger Report. Retrieved November 28, 2022, from https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-colleges-that-ditched-test-scores-for-admissions-find-its-harder-to-be-fair-in-choosing-students-researcher-says/

Henn, J. L. (2020, September 3). College Board AP Exams Case Should Be Arbitrated, Lawyers Say. Top Class Actions. Retrieved November 28, 2022, from https://topclassactions.com/lawsuit-settlements/education/college-board-ap-exams-case-should-be-arbitrated-lawyers-say/

Schmill, S. (2022, March 28). We are reinstating our SAT/ACT requirement for future admissions cycles. MIT Admissions. Retrieved November 28, 2022, from https://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/we-are-reinstating-our-sat-act-requirement-for-future-admissions-cycles/

College Admissions, SAT Prep, Testing TipsAlyssa the College ExpertArticle