Redesigned SAT rolls out on Saturday
INDIANAPOLIS (WISH) — High school students taking the SAT Saturday will be taking a brand new test. March 5 is the first testing day with the redesigned SAT. The College Board changed the SAT to make sure students have the skills colleges are now looking for. The redesign is the biggest change to the SAT in ten years.
Experts expect this test to be more challenging for students, but they say it will also better prepare them for college. Wendy McNarney, a teacher at Lawrence North High School, explained some of the changes. McNarney teaches a college readiness course and is helping her students prepare for the new test.
McNarney said the SAT will now have 154 questions instead of 170. Students will still have five hours to complete the test. Instead of 10 sections, there will now be four sections — reading, writing, math with a calculator and math without a calculator. The scoring will also be different. A perfect score will now be 1,600 instead of 2,400. The scoring will be 800 for math and 800 for reading and writing. According to McNarney, most state colleges look for a score of about 1,000.
The essay portion of the test is expected to be more of an analysis of a piece of writing, instead of a persuasive, opinionated essay. McNarney said even though there are fewer questions, that doesn’t mean the test is going to be any easier.
“There’s going to be more Algebra II questions, there’s going to be more Trig questions, there’s still not any calculus questions, but the reason they’ve reduced the questions is that they’ve taken off some of the easy ones and they’ve added a lot more in-depth, thought provoking math questions especially,” said McNarney.
The College Board decided to change the test to make sure incoming college freshman have the skills they need. Experts expect the test to include ore of the curriculum students study in high school, along with real-world problem solving.
“It’s going to have more common core questions. It’s going to be much more analogous to a classroom test that they’d see in their Math class or their English class, and not so much of a reasoning — ‘you’ve never seen this type of question before, what can you do to reason through it and get it right?’.” said McNarney.
McNarney said students should take as many practice tests and timed tests as they can to prepare. You can find practice resources on the College Board website here. You can also download a practice app for the new SAT here. McNarney recommends students take both the SAT and ACT, and whichever test they do better on, they should take one more time.
I feel like it will be a more challenging test, but I feel like our kids are going to rise to the challenge and if they want to go off to college they’re going to need to figure out a way to get a good score on this test,” said McNarney. “The goal is still the same, to increase those scores. Even though the subject matter is going to be tougher, I think our kids are getting smarter and they’re taking harder classes earlier, and I think that will reflect in their scores.”