The SAT announces another big change

On January 25, 2022, the College Board announced a significant change to the SAT. The test will be administered digitally beginning in March of 2024. The PSAT/NMSQT will be administered digitally beginning in the fall of 2023. You can read the official College Board announcement here: https://newsroom.collegeboard.org/digital-sat-brings-student-friendly-changes-test-experience 

On January 28, 2022, TPAPT, a national consortium of tutors and college admissions professionals organized an informal meeting to discuss the change. 

 Here is some of the information shared at the meeting: 

The digital version of the test will not simply be the current test delivered digitally. It will be a computer adaptive test (or CAT). Each student will see a unique set of questions. Which questions a student sees later in the test will be determined by how well the student did early in the test. There are multiple ways to approach computer adaptive testing, and we have been told that the revised SAT will use the method that is currently being used for the GRE - the test many students need to apply to graduate school. In this method, the test material is delivered in "chunks", or groups of questions. Student performance in the first chunk will determined whether the second chunk will be easy, medium, or difficult. Whereas the scaled score on the current SAT counts all questions as being equal in value, the scaled score on the new version will be affected by the difficulty of the questions in the second chunk. 

A calculator of some kind will be allowed on all math questions. (The current version has a calculator-inactive section.) The rumor that was shared is that students would have access to DESMOS - an online graphing calculator app - during the test. If true, this would represent an improvement for most students since DESMOS has become the primary graphing calculator used in schools, supplanting the TI-84. 

The reading section will be combined with the writing and language section. It is unclear what this will look like. 

Some questions were raised to which we do not yet have answers: 

Will the scores on the revised test have a normal curve similar to that of the current test? More specifically, would a particular individual score on the new test be roughly equivalent to the same score on the current test? Is that even a goal that they will consider as they design and write the new test items and as they set the scaling algorithms? 

Will the scaling algorithm be transparent?  In the past, the College Board has released tests along with the scaling table for that test.  The scaling algorithm was clearly spelled out:  so many correct answers = this particular scaled score.  If every individual student has a unique set of test questions, we likely won't have any released tests.  They've promised "practice material" on Khan Academy, which will likely include full simulations of practice tests along with a scaled score at the end, but will they share the scaling algorithm?  

Will the students be issued scratch paper? 

Pilot testing went well - both students and proctors were pleased. However, what will happen as they scale up and have to contend with the inevitable technology snafus? 

Will the two chunks of verbal questions be given back to back, or will there be a chunk of math in between? 

How will this affect the advanced math student who hasn't seen the material in the first math chunk since middle school? Will that prevent them from being presented the difficult math questions that reflect their current course work? 

I'm sure we'll be getting more information over the coming months, and those of us who are gearing up to prepare students for this new challenge will be watching for the promised prep material!

What SAT/ACT prep books are still on my shelf? (ACT edition)

With the transition to the “new” SAT and the somewhat less comprehensive changes to the ACT, my prep resources have undergone a change.  Some books have been culled out or replaced with updated editions, and several new titles have been added.  This is the ACT edition.  Click here for the SAT edition.

Here are the winners:

For ACT English:

The Complete Guide to ACT English, Second Edition by Erica Meltzer

This is one of the most-used books on my shelf.  Sometimes I even use it for SAT students who need punctuation help.

For ACT math:

Ms. Cindy's ACT Math Book by Cynthia Hemminger

Full disclosure:  I wrote this one.  If you buy it I'll get a little money.  (I'm hoping to recoup my costs; I doubt any of the authors on this page are getting rich off of this.)  This book suits my tutoring style, and I will have many of my students buy it.  However, if you are scoring in the 30's already and you really want that 36, you might want a book with more problems and less explanation, such as the following:

The College Panda ACT Math: Advanced Guide and Workbook by Nielson Phu

This book has a LOT of practice problems.  It is fairly comprehensive.  It is the first book off the shelf after mine.

I also pull in problems from my SAT math section.

For ACT Reading:

I’m still looking!  If you have any suggestions, let me know!

ACT Science:

For the Love of ACT Science by Michael Cerro

Is there another ACT Science book?  Not that I know of.  I quite like this one, but I would love to see it expanded.

The “losers”:

Top 50 Skills for a Top Score by Brian Leaf

I used this one for certain students back in the day, but the test has changed over the past several years, and this book hasn’t.

For the Love of ACT Math by Private Prep

This book has a lot going for it, but it doesn’t suit my style.  It looks like it would be really good for someone who needs work in all or most areas of math and who has a lot of time to prep before the test.  It was really designed for you to start at the beginning and march your way through.  It has a LOT of problems, but they aren’t organized in a way that would work for someone trying to take an a la carte approach.  You would also need a high tolerance for “dad jokes” and the ability/willingness to go online for the answer explanations.   I will include a link to order this one in case it sounds like a good match for you.

Manhattan Prep 5 lb Book of ACT Practice Problems

Once I discovered this book, I used it heavily for about a year.  Then the test emphases shifted, but the book hasn’t been updated.  Now it’s gathering dust.  It’s still on my shelf mainly because it’s the right size and heft to keep the other books from flopping over.  I should just find a nice-looking bookend instead.

I took the ACT today

The ACT has made 4 big changes to the test in the last two years.  They have only announced one of them.  Their new practice book reflecting these changes is long overdue, and won't be published until July.  We have a real shortage of representative practice tests, and that's an issue for a test on which timing is critical.  I signed up to take this test partly for the experience but mostly to get the test booklet:  I paid extra for the question-and-answer service.

Here are my brief impressions:

First, I have been timing my students incorrectly.  I have timed them at my dining room table, or I have allowed them to time themselves at home.  I have not set the timer and had them complete the test while perched before a desk the size of a large clipboard trying to juggle their extra pencils, test books, answer sheets and calculators.  And it makes a difference.  Especially on the ACT where timing is a big piece of your performance.

This was not my first big test as an adult.  A few years back I took the SAT Math 2 subject test.  The desks at that high school were quite a bit larger.  In the future I will take desk size into account when choosing a testing site.  Meanwhile, if anyone is looking for a research topic for their PhD in Education, this might be interesting to study.

The English section went well for me, but hats off to Erica Meltzer!  On more than one question I can credit my correct answer to The Complete Guide to ACT English.  It's my go-to grammar workbook. 

The math section went well for me, but HO.LY. CRUD.  The ACT folks really upped their game in the conic sections category.  Unless there was something I missed, you had to write the equation of a ellipse from the graph and then use that equation to find the y-coordinate of a point on the ellipse. Yikes.  Most of my kids haven't looked at the standard equation of an ellipse at all, ever.  My treatment of them up til now has been fairly cursory.  I guess that will have to change.

I thought the reading section was a tad bit easier than usual.  There was only one question on which I disagreed with all of the answer choices.  Usually there are more.

I thought the science section was a tad bit harder than usual, and the tiny table issue didn't help.  I wonder if you can apply for a Larger Desk accommodation.  Fortunately most of my kids taking this test have already banked respectable science scores.  They should be ok.

Is it "unfair" to get a test-prep tutor or enroll in an expensive course?

I once had a parent call to explore the idea of getting an SAT coach for his daughter.  He told me about her, but then he said he was worried about whether or not getting her a coach represented an unfair advantage.  I pointed out that since she was at an expensive private school, her application would be read as if she had a coach whether she did or not.  (I did not point out how funny it was that he was worried about unequal access to test coaching, but not about unequal access to the private school she was in.  They also lived in one of the neighborhoods filled with mcmansions.) I guess my argument did not carry the day, because I didn't end up working with his daughter.

So is there an inequity involved in spending money to get your child ready for a college entrance exam?  And if there is, how much should you worry about that?  Would the world be a better place if everyone boycotted the tutors, the Princeton Review, the books, and online courses?  This came up on Quora, and this was my reply:

Here is something to keep in mind about "SAT coaching": It is a really big umbrella. When we read or hear about it in the media it sounds like the rich kids are buying special secrets that you only get to have if you have enough money. I assure you that I have never given anyone a test-taking tip that isn't available "out there" for everyone. As one fellow tutor always says, "There is no special sauce." Hiring an SAT coach might be like hiring a personal trainer. Most people could do it on their own, but hiring someone streamlines the process. People with more money than time tend to do this for all aspects of their lives including SAT preparation.

When parents call me to coach their kids for a college entrance exam they always say, "He/she is a very good student, but he/she doesn't test well." They will allow that the student might need just a little review, but they will anxiously inquire as to whether I teach the testing tips. And I say, "Umm...sure." And I do. For five minutes. And then we spend the rest of the ten hours on the algebra he never learned, or the grammar she completely missed because they moved at just the wrong time. You see, there is a lot of cachet in going to an SAT tutor every week. There is no cachet at all in going to an I-never-learned-grammar tutor every week.

Is it fair that the rich kid who never learned grammar gets a tutor to fill in that hole before he has to take his college entrance exam, while the poor kid who never learned grammar doesn't? Of course not. However, it would be silly to say that no one gets to learn grammar until everyone can. Or that no one can know algebra well until everyone does. Surely the more educated people we have the better off we are.

So, in answer to your question: If you need a coach, and you can afford one, get a coach. Be a more educated person. If you are worried about the inequities of this world - and really, if you were to rank all of the inequities in the world, unequal access to SAT tutors wouldn't make the top ten - then use your increased knowledge to do good.

Impressions on the new practice PSAT

A few days ago the College Board posted a new PSAT practice test.  This is the practice test for the redesigned PSAT to be given in October 2015.  It is also a glimpse of what the redesigned SAT might look like. 

There has been a great deal of speculation about the redesigned test.   A number of people have opined that the new test would be an “ACT clone.”  I, myself, have speculated that the new test would be designed as more of a high school exit exam than a college entrance exam.  Quite a few pundits have pointed out that the SAT was losing market share to the ACT and thought that the redesign might be an effort to gain that share back.

Upon looking over the test, I am now prepared to make the following statements:

The writing section IS barely distinguishable from the writing portion of the ACT.  Otherwise, this test is in no way an ACT clone.  On the other hand, I do feel that this test represents a fundamental shift in purpose.

There are a number of possible purposes for giving a standardized exam.  (This would be as opposed to a teacher-made assessment.)  Here are a few:

• To document student learning (or lack thereof) of particular skills and concepts
• To distinguish among (or rank) students
• To drive the curriculum*

Prior to 2015, the PSAT’s fundamental purpose has been a balance of the first two items.  As the National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test it has been used to distinguish top students from the pack, and it has documented whether or not students have a grasp of particular skills and concepts.  It has NOT been used to drive the curriculum...until now.  In my opinion, several of the changes were specifically designed to have an impact on the nature and content of classroom instruction.

One of the elements of Common Core language arts is a focus on having students read critically.  In an effort to have the students respond to what the author actually said – as opposed to how they feel about what they think the author said – students are being asked to point to pieces of the text as “evidence.”  In the PSAT critical reading portion, students are asked to choose the best evidence for almost every question.  Now I’m not a language arts teacher, and I don’t have any special critical reading or psychometric expertise.  However, it seems to me that this is about the same as asking the same question twice.  In other words, if you correctly answer the original question, then the answer to the “evidence” follow up is trivial.  If you missed the original question it would be impossible.  Will there be some kind of scoring mechanism that uses this question-pairing to determine when the correct answer was obtained by guessing?  Maybe.  It is more likely an attempt to make sure teachers require their students to give evidence in class.

Here is another example from the math section.  Months ago, when the sample questions were released, I noticed that some of the questions were much longer and more involved.  This represents a distinct shift.  Up until now I have told my top students, “If you are more than 3 steps into an algebra process, you probably missed something.”  One of my main criticisms of some of the test prep books out there has been that too many of the math questions can ONLY be solved with the application of tedious algebraic steps and are thus not representative of the real thing.  However, this has changed with the PSAT practice test.  It’s interesting.  If I’m a professor of mathematics or engineering I’m interested in multiple different aspects of their math skills.  I want them to have a solid grasp of the concepts, good number sense, AND I want them to be able to keep track of what they are doing through a long problem that requires many steps and sub-steps to solve.

Up until now, the major college entrance exams did a decent job of testing the first two. (The SAT was better than the ACT in my opinion.) They really haven’t attempted to do the third.  This is largely because a multiple choice or single final answer exam format is a TERRIBLE way to assess that third skill.  If the student’s answer is incorrect, you don’t know if he really can’t negotiate the process or if he just made a silly error in the middle.  Graded homework and teacher-made assessments where partial credit is given are much better means of determining whether or not the student can handle a long problem.  Both of those would be reflected in the students’ grades.  By trying to test it in this format, you add no new information.  The only reason I can come up with to include problems like this is to encourage math teachers to have students practice longer, more complex problems.

When the College Board first announced that the SAT would be re-designed, an admissions officer at a small, selective school wondered in an online forum, “Will the rSAT do a better job of distinguishing among students at the top end of the spectrum?”  This was what she was hoping for.  Other users of the forum predicted that it would not.  To do so would require a test with a wider standard deviation, and a large contingent of the (math-challenged) public believes that a wide standard deviation is inherently “unfair.”  In fact, the speculation was that the new test would do a worse job of highlighting differences among students.  Given that the redesigned test appears to have abandoned that goal altogether in favor of driving the curriculum, I’d say that admissions officers at selective schools will be plumb out of luck.

The practice PSAT is posted here: https://collegereadiness.collegeboard.org/sat-suite-assessments/practice/practice-tests

* You may be wondering what it means to have a test “drive the curriculum.”  Let’s look at an extreme example.  Throughout the 1990’s and early 2000’s North Carolina had a state writing assessment.  In fourth, eighth and tenth grades students had to write a timed essay and send it off to be scored by specially trained “experts.”  After several years of dismal results, some statisticians called “foul.”  They pointed out that the scoring methods were severely flawed, and thus that the scores were ultimately meaningless.  (By the way, the scoring methods used to score the ACT and SAT essays have some of the same issues.)  The state’s surprising response?  “Yes, we know.”  Students (and by extension their teachers and parents) suffered through this test for YEARS.  Why?  Because if there’s a writing test – even a flawed one - teachers will spend time teaching writing.  The average amount of classroom time spent on writing instruction quadrupled.  Prior to the test, some teachers had spent ZERO time teaching writing.

To pre-order the practice book for the redesigned SAT:

Study materials review: Up Your Score ACT

Up Your Score for the SAT was originally introduced in the 1980's.  It is periodically updated by a fresh crop of perfect scorers.  (You can read my review of that book here.) This is the first ACT version.  It was put together by a test prep tutor (Chris Arp) and 3 perfect-scoring students who are now in college.  Like the SAT version, the book is cute and clever.  Also like the SAT version you have to wade through an awful lot of cute and clever to get to the actual meat of the advice.  As you may have gleaned from my previous reviews, I like the books that offer targeted practice.  This one does not.  It was not written as a stand-alone resource; you'd have to buy a guide with actual practice tests as well.  As of this writing (June 2014) the price isn't bad - about $14.  Still, there's no reason not to just check a copy out of the library.

There is some fairly interesting study advice that will apply to subjects other than the ACT, and, as I mentioned in a previous post, the section on punctuation is particularly useful.  If you really need to own your own copy, there is a link below.

Euclid is rolling over in his grave.

Standardized testing has killed geometry.  All that’s left to do is plan the funeral.  True, geometry had been ailing for some time and was too weak to put up a fight.  Still, theoretical mathematicians should pause for a moment of silence and then figure out what to do next.

The objective of geometry was never understood by most modern folks.  They tended to dismiss it as the study of “shapes” and to wonder why it was included in the curriculum.  But geometry was never about shapes.  Shapes were merely intended as the vehicle for making deductive reasoning more accessible to students.  Students tended to find formal proof to be very challenging, and as the self-esteem movement grew and grade inflation ran amuck, math teachers were under more pressure to gloss over the proofs that made the subject so difficult.  Eventually, many, if not most, high school students went off to college without ever having done a formal mathematical proof.

Still, geometry problems tended to involve informal deductive reasoning:  “I know these two lines are parallel, therefore these angles must be congruent.  If that’s true, then this thing is a parallelogram and these two line segments are congruent.”  In addition, geometry continued to be a class where you had to be careful and precise about how you talked about something.  Definitions were important.  Leave out a phrase, and everything changes.

The problem is that formal deductive reasoning can be difficult to test.  Informal deductive reasoning is easier to test, but requires a great deal of background knowledge about “shapes.”  Thus the layperson thinks that “shapes” was the concept being tested in the first place, and does anyone really need to remember that a midsegment of a triangle is half the length of the side to which it is parallel?

So now the Common Core Standards and the SAT have essentially gutted geometry from the curriculum.  Only the bits about shapes that are essential to trigonometry and to transformations (since there is an increased emphasis on graphing functions by transformations) have been kept. Formal definitions and proof are no longer included.  For true mathematicians this means that real math is no longer taught in kindergarten through 12^th grade at all.  What’s left is just the arithmetic and modeling needed for science and statistics.  Where will our future mathematicians come from?