What's Good About the New SAT Test

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Finally, I was right about one other thing: that the grading of the essay would reward formulaic, colorless writing over sharp young voices. The average essay score for kids who wrote in first person was 6.9, compared with 7.2 for the half who didn’t write in first person. (A 1-12 scale is used to grade essays. That grade is then combined with the score on a multiple-choice grammar segment of the writing test and translated into the familiar 200-to-800 points.) As my editors know well, first-person writing isn’t always great. But along with this year’s test scores, the College Board distributed a guide called “20 Outstanding SAT Essays” — all of them perfect scores — and many are unbearably mechanical and cliché-ridden (“smooth sailing always comes after the storm”; “they say that history repeats itself”). One of the 20 kids did write a funny, sweet little story about a child’s birthday party, but this is a typical thought from another, who wrote about Vietnam: “As victory elluded (sic) the ever increasing forces more and more, the situation drastically worsened.” Remember: this is one of the 20 best writers the College Board could find.

But there is good news. The central contention of my 2003 story was that the SAT’s shift from an abstract-reasoning test to a test of classroom material like Algebra II would hurt kids from failing schools. I worried that the most vulnerable students would suffer when faced with the new SAT. I was wrong. In fact, the very poorest children — those from families earning less than $20,000 a year — improved their SAT performance this year. It was a modest improvement — just three points — but significant given the overall slump in scores. And noncitizen residents and refugees saw their scores rise by an impressive 13 points. It was middle-class and rich kids who account for the much-reported decline.

What explains those wonderfully unpredictable findings? The College Board has no firm answers. But its top researcher, Wayne Camara, suggests a theory that, while self-serving for the College Board, fits the data: the new SAT is less coachable. When designing the new test, the Board banned analogies and “quantitative comparisons” (flummoxing math questions that asked you to compare two complex quantities). “I think those items disadvantaged students who did not have the resources, the motivation, the awareness, to figure out how to approach them,” says Camara. “By eliminating those, the test becomes much less about strategy.” By focusing more on what high schools teach and less on tricky reasoning questions, the SAT became more egalitarian.

I’ve never been so happy to be wrong.