Due in part to recent criticisms by the University of California, the College Board has scheduled a June meeting of its trustees in order to revise the Scholastic Assessment Test, which over one million college-bound students take each year.
Proposed changes to the test -- which include the addition of a writing section, the elimination or drastic reduction of the analogy section, and the addition of second-year algebra and trigonometry problems to the math section -- will most likely take effect for students graduating high school in 2006.
Because such revisions would be designed to have the test more closely reflect the current high school curriculum, they are part of a relatively recent trend to render the test more of an achievement than an aptitude examination. Before 1990, for example, the acronym SAT had stood for Scholastic Aptitude Test.
Criticisms of the current exam that the College Board hopes to redress include its failure to test what is stressed in high school classrooms, as well as the disadvantages that the present version poses to minority students and students of lower socioeconomic backgrounds.
A more curriculum-based test may include less ethnic and economic bias than the current exam, since statistics show that higher income plays less of a role in performance on the 22 curriculum-based SAT-II subject tests, which are offered in academic subjects such as biology, chemistry and history.
Revisions to the SAT could potentially render it more useful to admissions officers. Studies released by the U.S. Department of Education in 1999 indicate that the best predictor of students' ability to succeed in college resides in the intensity of their respective high school curriculums,
William Hiss, a former dean of admissions and financial aid at Bates College and a critic of the exam, told The Dartmouth in February: "When [students'] grades and courses, recommendations, and writing are all strong, the [present test] may be not only unhelpful, but truly misleading when we try to assess their academic potential."
Assessing the current test, Jan Scheiner, a Dartmouth psychology professor, said previously that "[The SAT] is more helpful in sorting out kids at the upper end of the distribution. For very bright kids applying to highly selective schools, the SAT has good incremental validity."
She added, however, that "The SAT makes certain assumptions about the educational experiences of the person taking the test."
Such "educational experiences" that the SATs presume test-takers will have include, for example, a native speaker's understanding of English.
Analogies, however, require a nuanced understanding of English rather memorization of vocabulary, which may put students who speak English as a second language at a disadvantage.
Nevertheless, alterations to the test, according Gaston Caperton, president of the College Board, will not result in the development of "a whole new test."
"You can only change so much if you want to have longitudinal data, comparing results over the years," he told The New York Times. Even the novel addition of a writing section is "something that was recommended to be added as far back as 1993."
According to Caperton, less than 50 percent of the test content will change, so that similar test scores on the revised and current test will reflect comparable scholastic merit.
Despite this purported gradualism, the date of the College Board's implementation of an altered test indicates that change is occurring rapidly. The process of developing one question for the test, for example, may last from eighteen months to two years, which renders the appearance of a revised test in 2006 a relatively bold proposal.
With the University of California's discussions of eliminating the SATs from admissions requirements, the SAT board has considerable motivation to take action.
As Coletti told the Dartmouth last February, "[The College Board] has agreed to work with the University of California in devising a new test... The University of California is a prestigious system, and we really want to take our members' needs into consideration."
With 178, 000 students and nine campuses, the University of California is the College Board's largest consumer of SAT test.
