[To commemorate the second anniversary of the “Redesigned SAT,” this is installment #2 of a three-part article. If you’d like to read the whole article in one shot, simply email your request to DrYo@CollegePrepExpress.com. Dr. Yo would like to express his gratitude to the following students for their valuable input: Yash Nair, Justin and Chritian Andreoli, and Nick and Chris Consoli. You guys rock! Originally posted March, 2018.]
What I’ve discovered over the last several years, both from my own careful study of the eight sample tests in The Official SAT Study Guide in an effort to help students raise their scores and from my observations of which of my students tend to do better on which college entrance exam, I have to admit, counterintuitive. Because the exams are more similar in form and content than ever before (see Installment #1 and Dr. Yo’s Easier/Harder Guide to the Redesigned SAT), their essential underlying differences that have existed for generations are much easier to see and prepare for. And these differences explain why more often than not—and having nothing to do with overall intelligence, or, paying homage to Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligence, nothing to do with the two subsets of general intelligence measured on standardized tests, verbal/linguistic and logical/mathematical intelligences—a given kid will perform better on one test than the other.
One useful way to think about learning styles as they impact performance on standardized tests is to situate a given student on the following spectrum: at one extreme are the students who pride themselves on always doing reasonably well in school without having to try very hard. These students pay attention in class as new material is presented, they are generally quick studies, and they luxuriate in getting all their “homework” done before they actually get home. Often they don’t need to crack a book until late middle or early high school, at which point they’re often resentful that school has grown so complicated and time-consuming (these kids are awesome). They perform well on tests not because of their vast storehouses of knowledge but rather because they’ve trained themselves to think rather than memorize and consequently they’ve become careful readers and interpreters of questions, even if they’ve never seen questions like them before. Students who tend toward this end of the spectrum generally do better on the SAT than the ACT.
At the other end of the spectrum are students who know their academic achievements come from good old-fashioned blood, sweat, and tears. They’ve earned their grades by knowing what a given course/teacher/textbook expects them to learn and they systematically go about learning it, in many cases memorizing it. They take good notes in class, write almost everything down, and study individually and in like-minded groups for every test (these kids are also awesome). Because they’re so well-prepared and can anticipate questions on the test, they rarely THINK during tests–they’ve done all their thinking well BEFORE the test–and instead jump right into to every question and start answering immediately. These are the students who often complain bitterly about the “unfairness” of teachers who ask even a single question on a test they haven’t seen before, i.e., in class, for homework, or on a quiz. Students toward this end of the spectrum typically do better on the ACT than the SAT.
The reason why students with different learning styles perform better on one or the test can’t be explained by differences in either material, again except for the Science Test on the ACT, or level of difficulty. One reasonably accurate way to characterize the two exams is that they both require the same math and grammar knowledgeable and the same type of reading comprehension skills (see Installment #3) . The crucial difference is that the ACT emphasizes not only a basic knowledge of material, but also the demonstration of that knowledge in the student’s ability to answer more questions in the time allotted, whereas the SAT values “reasoning” or thinking, which students can demonstrate in their ability to answer questions phrased very differently from what they’re used to in school. That added wrinkle of making students think might make the SAT seem harder, except, and it’s a huge except, it is no small matter that there are more questions per time in every section of the ACT than the SAT. In other words, the ACT may not ask you to think very much, but they expect you to know the material on the exam so well that you can get through a lot more questions in the given time. Frankly, there is no time to think. And the SAT may at first seem harder, until you realize that 1) much of the particular challenge of the SAT is simply decoding and correctly interpreting their questions and 2) they actually give you plenty of time to think (for example, average time/question on ACT Math: exactly 1 min; average time/question on SAT Math: ~1.4 min, or 40% more; this is true across the board, as we’ll see in the next, and final, installment).
The College Board has maintained for generations that its SAT is a reasoning test, i.e., that it values thinking as much as knowing. For a time it was actually officially called the SAT Reasoning Test. This explains why there’s significantly more reading to do across the board on the SAT than the ACT—there’s more reading on the reading section (65 min versus 35 min), and more reading the math section, where items come more frequently in the form of paragraph(s) than sentences. The more reading you have to do, the more you have to think and interpret. Sometimes the necessary thinking can make questions very challenging, but other times all you have to do to get an SAT problem right is to read the question carefully and be certain you know what they’re asking. For example, a common SAT Writing and Language (i.e., grammar) question asks something like this: Which of the following is the best introductory part of the sentence given the examples that follow? All you have to do is figure out what the examples that follow have in common, and then choose the answer that best captures that commonality. EASY! The same is true in Math, where, for example, they ask questions like this: Which of the following gives an equation of the parabola shown below in which the vertex appears as constants in the equation? The hardest parts about this item is being clear about what they’re asking (and not wigging out on the face of it because your Algebra 2/Precalc teacher never asks questions like this or reminding yourself how much you hate parabolas). Basically what they’re saying is that the coordinates of the vertex, which is a simple matter to read off the graph, actually appear in one of the equations in the answers. If the coordinates of the vertex are (3,4) for example, all you have to do is pick out the one equation that has a 3 and a 4 in it. (i.e., the 3 and the 4 actually appear as constants in the equation). Although it is a math problem, it really requires as much verbal as math ability. In the end, questions like these are neither harder nor easier; they simply reward one type of student/learner/thinker over another.
[In the next installment, Dr. Yo offers more specific examples of major differences between SAT and ACT items in a section by section comparative analysis. If you’d like to read the whole article in one shot, simply email your request to DrYo@CollegePrepExpress.com]