Education Week - March 12, 2014 - 14

Citing Evidence for Answers a Key Feature of SAT Redesign
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1
the research director at the Education
Trust, a Washington-based
research and advocacy group for
low-income and minority students,
applauded the effort.
"Overall, it's great that the College
Board is taking responsibility for
the SAT and really doing a major redesign-and
not just doing tweaks,
as they have in the past," she said.
"This change really reflects more
current conversation about what we
want kids in high school to be learning
and doing."
Some skeptics, though, view the
shifts as largely driven by the SAT's
shrinking market share.
"This is a PR maneuver to shore
up the relative standing of the SAT
against the ACT, and also a maneuver
against test-optional colleges,"
said Joseph Soares, a professor of
sociology at Wake Forest University,
in Winston Salem, N.C., who has researched
college-admissions tests.
About 850 colleges and universities
now leave it up to students
whether to submit entrance-exam
scores with their applications.
Mr. Soares contends that the
changes last made to the SAT, in 2005,
were a failure that only widened the
gap in performance between students
with different family incomes. The
planned redesign is not a fundamental
change, Mr. Soares says.
"[The SAT] will still be ... weak or
useless for predicting how well people
do in college," he said.
'It Is Our Problem'
In addition to content revisions, the
new SAT will not penalize students for
wrong answers, but only give credit
for correct ones-a move aimed at
removing some of the strategy from
test-taking. Also, the College Board
will begin offering the test in some
locations on computer. Furthermore,
calculators will only be permitted for
certain math questions.
In May 2012, when it was announced
that Mr. Coleman would
lead the College Board, he said that
reshaping the SAT to better reflect
the common-core standards would
be a top priority. But the materials
released by the College Board last
week make no mention of the common
core, and Mr. Coleman did not
touch on the topic in his address.
Robert Rothman, a senior fellow at
the Washington-based Alliance for
Excellent Education, said that, as described,
the SAT revisions would put
the exam much more in line with the
common-core standards. He said it
was a "glaring omission" for the College
Board not to mention the standards,
which nearly all states have
adopted, in the rollout.
The New York City-based College
Board's announcement of the new
SAT comes as the common standards
for English/language arts and mathematics
have drawn increased criticism
across states. Indiana, for one,
appears on track to void its 2010
adoption of the standards. (See related
story, Page 1.)
Meanwhile, lawmakers in other
states, from South Carolina to New
York, are considering plans to repeal
adoption of the standards or delay
their implementation.
During a question-and-answer
session after his speech in Austin-where
the South by Southwest
education conference took place last
week-Mr. Coleman addressed an
inquiry about his silence on the new
SAT's similarities to the common core.
"The crucial idea ... is this exam focuses
on those few things where evidence
is overwhelming that they're
essential for college- and careerreadiness,"
Mr. Coleman said. "And
that resonates throughout the best of
state standards, throughout the common
core. ... I think it is time to focus
more on the work that students need
to do, and less on slogans."
A major theme in Mr. Cole-
man's presentation was the College
Board's plans to go beyond the
exam itself to expand opportunity
for disadvantaged students.
"We cannot stand aside and say,
'We made a good test. It's not our
fault what happens before and
after,' " he said. "It may not be our
fault, but it is our problem."
To encourage low-income students
to apply to more colleges, four fee
waivers for college applications will
be given directly to eligible students,
he said. Also, in an effort to reduce
the advantage of costly test preparation,
Mr. Coleman announced that
students will have access to free online
SAT-prep materials from Khan
Academy. (See story, this page.)
At the same time, Mr. Coleman
said one goal of the new SAT is to be
less susceptible to test preparation
and cramming.
"The SAT has been criticized for
being too coachable in the past," said
Barbara Gill, a member of the board
of trustees of the College Board
and the assistant vice president of
undergraduate admissions at the
14 | EDUCATION WEEK | March 12, 2014 | www.edweek.org
Sal Khan, the founder of Khan
Academy, speaks at an event
in Austin, Texas, about his
organization's new partnership
with the College Board to
provide free online test
preparation for the SAT.
At left is David Coleman,
who became the president
of the College Board in 2012.
University Maryland College Park.
"This major change will make the
content of the SAT more transparent
so schools and teachers will have a
better idea of what is on the SAT."
More details about the test specifications
will be announced April 16.
The redesign work began over a
year ago, and a new test was originally
slated to roll out in the spring
of 2015. The effort has involved hundreds
of College Board staff members,
as well as members of the organization
from K-12 and higher education,
according to board officials. Input
also was garnered from more than 80
campus meetings in 2013.
The rival ACT announced last year
that it would offer "enhancements" to
its test in the spring of 2015, aligning
it more closely with the common core
and phasing in computer-based testing,
said Paul Weeks, a vice president
for customer engagement at ACT Inc.,
based in Iowa City, Iowa.
"ACT doesn't need an overhaul. We
have always been curriculum-based
and predictive," said Mr. Weeks, adding
that the redesign of the SAT is a
validation of the ACT approach.
Robert A. Schaeffer of FairTest, a
group that has long been critical of the
SAT, said in a statement that the SAT
changes don't adequately address concerns
that the exam fails to accurately
assess low-income students, and that
the tests are susceptible to expensive
coaching.
Structural Changes
The new SAT will be three hours
long, with an optional essay of 50 minutes.
The test now is three hours and
45 minutes, including the essay.
There will be three sections: "ev-
idenced-based reading and writing";
mathematics; and the optional
essay. Without a required essay,
which was added in 2005 as part of
a new writing section, SAT scoring
will return to a 1600-point scale.
Mr. Coleman said that perhaps
the most important change for students
is that the penalty for wrong
answers will be discontinued.
Ms. Theokas of the Education
Trust said the writing test is of dubious
worth because students are
more concerned about the form and
structure of the writing than its content.
They can write factually incorrect
statements and not reflect on
real evidence, which isn't good writing,
she said. Ms. Theokas also said
making the essay optional is a good
way to shorten what is a long test.
The College Board said the essay
has not added value to predictions of
college writing success. Admissions
officers have been split about the usefulness
of the score, so, in 2016, it will
be up to colleges to require the essay
score-and up to students whether to
write an essay.
Writing will still be evaluated in the
new SAT as part of an integrated reading
and writing section. That section
will have a strong focus on requiring
students to analyze texts when they
write, according to Carol Jago, a past
president of the National Council of
Teachers of English, who chairs the
College Board's English academic advisory
committee.
"This is more reflective of the kind
of writing they will be asked to do
in college," said Ms. Jago. It is also
a "fairer" approach, she argues, because
all students will be responding
to a specific prompt.
Mr. Coleman said the College Board
Khan Academy Recruited
To Provide Online SAT Prep
By Benjamin Herold
Austin, Texas
It's not just the SAT itself that's
changing.
Soon, students will be able to
prepare for the high-stakes collegeentrance
exam by going on an online
"SAT quest," complete with custom
practice problems, instructional videos,
and tailored feedback offered by
the popular nonprofit learning website
Khan Academy.
Officials from both Khan Academy
and the College Board, which
administers the SAT, billed the new
partnership as an opportunity to
level the highly competitive-and
often expensive-playing field of SAT
test-preparation.
"The College Board cannot stand
by while some test-prep providers
intimidate parents at all levels of
income into the belief that the only
way to secure their child's success
is to pay for costly test preparation
and coaching," College Board
President David Coleman said in
prepared remarks delivered March
5 here, where the South by Southwest
education conference took
place last week. "It's time to shake
things up."
'Interactivity' and 'Richness'
Beginning immediately, stu-
dents and other users will be able
to access hundreds of previously
unreleased questions from past
SAT exams, as well as videos with
step-by-step solutions, on the Khan
Academy website.
To help students prepare for
the new exam, set to debut in
2016, Khan Academy next spring
will release materials and tools
bearing the College Board brand,
including adaptive and gamebased
online instructional offerings
that can gauge where individual
students are in their preparations
for the SAT, and provide
customized feedback.
Khan Academy founder Sal
Khan told reporters that the forthcoming
materials would offer "interactivity,
quality, and richness,"
with students getting "very personalized
feedback through the
exercise."
The redesigned SAT exam will rep-
resent a major change, with greater
emphasis on citing evidence to support
answers, more focus on analyzing
arguments, and fewer areas of
math coverage.
During a media briefing with reporters,
Mr. Khan and Mr. Coleman
acknowledged that providing online
preparation materials for math-
where "productive practice" of discrete
skills can lead to rapid learning
gains-will be easier than for reading
or writing.
"This will take some work," Mr.
Coleman said.
The digital divide is also a "real
issue for us" that's "not going to be
solved overnight," said Mr. Khan.
Recent data suggest many families
still lack broadband access. A
2013 survey by the Pew Research
Internet Project found that 70 percent
of U.S. adults have broadband
connections at home. The figure
for blacks was 62 percent, and for
Erich Schlegel for Education Week
http://www.edweek.org
Education Week - March 12, 2014

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