The College Board yesterday approved a bunch of changes to the SAT that were spurred by a threat that the University of California system would drop the SAT as an admissions requirement. Last year, UC President Richard Atkinson criticized the SAT for not reflecting high school curricula and offering an advantage to students who can afford expensive test prep courses. The most discussed change to the test is the introduction of a writing section; students will have 25 minutes to write an essay that will be graded by the College Board and also made available to university admissions committees online. The infamous analogies section of the SAT will be dropped, the "critical reading passages" section will be expanded, and Algebra II will be added to the math section. While the addition of an essay seems popular and sensible-too many admissions essays are of the pre-packaged, expertly edited, maybe storebought kind-ending the analogies has drawn criticism. In a commentary in The Chronicle of Higher Education, retired professor Paul Marx argues convincingly that students who lack the vocabulary and "core knowledge" to perform well on tasks like analogies will likely struggle to understand a newspaper article or challenging reading assignment in college. For more see "A New Look for SATs," by Mark Clayton, The Christian Science Monitor, June 25, 2002 and "Why We Need the SAT," by Paul Marx, The Chronicle of Higher Education, June 7, 2002 (available to subscribers only).
