In March 2016, the CollegeBoard rolled out a completely redesigned SAT, which they’d been planning and perfecting since 2012, the first year they were outsold by the ACT. Although all the changes were ultimately based on (or perhaps justified by) sound educational principles, whenever CollegeBoard representatives spoke about the specific changes or whenever articles were published about them, in almost every case they made the SAT more like the ACT, at least on the surface. These changes included the following: removing the guessing penalty; moving from five answer choices to four; replacing challenging vocabulary with simpler “words in context” and completely eliminating the sentence completion section; creating a new “Writing and Language” section that is so much like the ACT’s English Test I’m surprised they didn’t get sued (sidebar: both the ACT and the SAT versions are essentially grammar tests, but neither of them calls it a grammar test: the ACT calls it English and the SAT calls it Writing and Language); beefing up the Essay assignment, making it optional, and placing it last [NOTE the essay has since been dropped completely by the SAT]; and reducing the range of math questions to represent the “Heart of Algebra” and other important high school math topics (though they also added some really challenging questions that, quite simply, reward precalculus and beyond students under the more innocuous heading, “Passport to Higher Math”). In terms of both form and content, the only significant differences that remain are 1) the ACT’s Science Test (and even there, the redesigned SAT gestures toward the ACT by adding questions in the Reading and Writing and Language sections–go figure–about infographics, i.e., the same types of charts, diagrams, and graphs that appear in the ACT Science Test), 2) a small number of SAT math questions are student-produced rather than multiple choice, and 3) for 25 of the 80 total min of math on the SAT, calculators are NOT allowed.
Sophomores and juniors and their parents have been asking me for years about major differences between the two college entrance exams, but in 2016, when the SAT was in the news all the time, I was bombarded, especially by on-the-ball parents. The most commonly asked question went something like this: “Dr. Yo, unlike me, you have to keep up with all these changes to do your job, so can you please tell which one is easier and which one is harder now?” It’s a very simple question that seems perfectly reasonable. But it’s about as reasonable as this question: “Dr. Yo, we’re registering my kid for next year’s classes and we know how important GPA is for college admissions. So which class is easiest to get an A in, history or foreign language or computer science? When it comes to SAT versus ACT, it boils down to each individual student’s learning style and, one of its key byproducts, test-taking strengths. (Historical note: for a couple transitional years, when students had the choice to take either the pre-March ’16 SAT or the post-March ’16 SAT or both, I was often asked which one of those was easier/harder. This is a more reasonable question since it it at least compares apples to apples. My answer appears in a blog post from March 2016 and was based more on what I had read about the new test than my actual examination of it. Two years later I stand by my analysis for the most part, but I must admit I was wrong about the Reading test, which, because of its unprecedented length–65 min–and emphasis on historical documents, I thought would be harder. I did not consider two important factors which make it significantly easier than I expected: 1) there’s ample time to read thoroughly and reflect. Yes, 65 min is a long time to concentrate really hard on reading, but you 13 min per passage, almost 50% more time than the ACT’s ~9-min/passage on their Reading Test; 2) the very high degree of predictable questions types, for each one of which students can deploy specific problem-solving strategies.)…
[In the next installment, Dr. Yo profiles the types of students who tend to perform better on one as opposed to the other. If you’d like to read the whole article in one shot, simply email your request to DrYo@CollegePrepExpress.com]