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The Piedmont Highlander

The Piedmont Highlander

New SAT: a ninety-year-old American classic reborn

New SAT: a ninety-year-old American classic reborn

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Students nationwide took the new SAT for the first time on March 5. The College Board redesigned the ninety-year-old test to focus less on “memorizing words and facts you’ll never use in the real world” and to reflect both what students learn in high school as well as the skills needed in college, according to the College Board website.

Nearly 300,000 students took the test that Saturday, according to CNN. One of these test takers was PHS junior Alex Rufo, who said that, in her experience, the College Board delivered on these promises.

“There isn’t really anything that you have to have memorized for the test,” Rufo said. “It’s just math skills and reading skills.”

Compared to state-mandated testing, the SAT felt harder to Rufo, especially the math section and the essay, she said. However, Rufo said the SAT’s difficulty aligned with the practice tests provided by Khan Academy and the College Board that she prepared with.

Like Rufo, almost half of all examinees surveyed had used Khan Academy to study, according to a report released by the College Board on March 5. The number of students that paid for test preparation dropped by 19 percent from the old version.

“After I took the PSAT I probably spent like an hour once a week, which is less than people who have a tutor and have the tutoring and then they also have homework,” Rufo said. “As it’s gotten closer and closer, [I did] it more often.”

The new test removed the guessing penalty and allows participants to opt out of the essay portion, which now focuses on analysis of rhetorical devices in a passage. More real-world scenarios in contexts of other subject areas, such as history and science, appear in problems as well.

Despite the integration of more disciplines into the test, more key to a test taker’s success is how comfortable they are with overall reading comprehension, junior Yuka Matsuno said.

“It wasn’t actually like history and dates and stuff like that,” Matsuno said. “It was more just analyzing the writing and the writing choices.”

Matsuno said that while her practice tests have consisted of what she’s learned in school over the years, problems can still feel difficult for her in the math section.

Like Rufo, Matsuno has also been studying for the new SAT using Khan Academy.

“I’d known that I had learned it somewhere. I just didn’t know where or when or how to do it,” Matsuno said.

Matsuno has considered taking the ACT, but one turnoff for her is that it includes a science section.

The College Board website says that it will publish tables allowing colleges to interpret scores and compare them to those of the old SAT in their admissions decisions.

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