Revised SAT Won’t Include Obscure Vocabulary Words

New York Times ^ | April 16, 2014 | TAMAR LEWIN

[reaganaut1]

The College Board on Wednesday will release many details of its revised SAT, including sample questions and explanations of the research, goals and specifications behind them.

“We are committed to a clear and open SAT, and today is the first step in that commitment,” said Cyndie Schmeiser, the College Board’s chief of assessment, in a conference call on Monday, previewing the changes to be introduced in the spring of 2016.

She said the 211-page test specifications and supporting materials being shared publicly include “everything a student needs to know to walk into that test and not be surprised.”

The overall scoring will return to the old 1600 scales, based on a top score of 800 in reading and math.A New SAT Aims to Realign With SchoolworkMARCH 5, 2014 David Coleman is focusing on ways to encourage low-income students to go to select colleges.The Story Behind the SAT OverhaulMARCH 6, 2014 One big change is in the vocabulary questions, which will no longer include obscure words. Instead, the focus will be on what the College Board calls “high utility” words that appear in many contexts, in many disciplines — often with shifting meanings — and they will be tested in context. For example, a question based on a passage about an artist who “vacated” from a tradition of landscape painting, asks whether it would be better to substitute the word “evacuated,” “departed” or “retired,” or to leave the sentence unchanged. (The right answer is “departed.”)

The test will last three hours, with another 50 minutes for an optional essay in which students will be asked to analyze a text and how the author builds an argument.

[mistfree]

College has become a very expensive piece of paper proving that you passed high school twice.

[Night Hides Not]

This thread is esoteric and nebulous.

What's this tread got to do with astronomy?

Ummm...wait a sec...I was thinking of nebula...never mind.

[csvset]

Will words like twerk or selfie be included?

[muir_redwoods]

I’ll bet not one test-taker in a hundred could correctly state the actual meaning of either “prejudice” or “discrimination”

[MrB]

“what white people do”

[NorthMountain]

Arrant pedantry, up with which I shall not put!

[Verginius Rufus]

Nebula is cognate with Greek nephele (as in Aristophanes' Nephelokokkygia, Cloud-cuckoo-land), and I presume with the Russian word nebo meaning "sky."

Is that esoteric enough?

[expat_panama]

...Most people are not college material...

That's true on average for the world, but not true in the U.S.  

Americans are the best educated population in the world.   About 85% of Americans graduate from high school and most Americans enter collage.   It's no wonder that the American worker is by far the world's most productive.  Sure, lots of folks (even on these threads) love to bash America, Americans, and American education, but like it or not America is simply exceptional.

[outofsalt]

Now you’re just being abstruse.

[xzins]

As always, it really depends on what they mean by obscure. I’ve seen words come up at spelling bees that would choke a person with multiple PHds in latin, nuclear biological physics, psychology, English lit, and history.

There’s obscure and there’s OBSCURE.

Blepharochalasis anyone?

[heartwood]

The vocabulary words from the old SATs are not legal or technical terms. Some are mere pedantry, the thing you throw into an essay to win points from a certain kind of grader. Others are evocative, precise, and necessary for a rich literature.

I love to use an uncommon word when it is the perfect, precise word, but I learned decades ago to keep those words out of ordinary conversation or documents. Still, if I have the right conversational partner, or I am writing fiction, and one of those words is the RIGHT word, I will use it. And if I am reading or hearing Shakespeare I want a chance to decipher the words that he invented (incarnadine). Even Twain will throw a word in that requires a dictionary (philopena.) I would have to contrive a situation to use that word, but I regard Mr. Twain with gratitude nevertheless.

To take away the old vocabulary is both an attempt to reduce the SAT’s function as a de facto IQ test, and a further step away from the ideal of a college education in the liberal arts (that is, those arts that a free man should know, and leading to independent thinking) and towards the idea of an education serving the needs of business and government.

BTW, a requirement for common language in contracts does not preclude an unreadable number of pages.

[Rodamala]

It's not fair that some people are more successful than others, you see.

and this is why liberalism exists... to punish excellence and artificially prop up the weak.

[9YearLurker]

They already stripped most of the tough vocabulary out of the SAT when they took out the analogies.

This apparently is just removing the remaining scraps.

[9YearLurker]

I’d argue that above average kids from whatever country are the ones who tend to make it over here.

But I agree with your larger point.

[central_va]

The autoschediastic nature of this change will deturpate the SAT.

[Night Hides Not]

Is that esoteric enough?

Enough so that Aristophanes likely got his ass kicked whi;e partying at the Temple of Knossos in Crete.

[9YearLurker]

Yep, I remember topping out with 16th-grade scores pretty much across the board on achievement tests when I was in 5th and 6th grades. Has ever made me skeptical of education when I read about students reading at grade level or, gulp, below.

[dfwgator]

"First of all, we must internalize the 'flatulation' of the matter by transmitting the effervescence of the 'Indianisian' proximity in order to further segregate the crux of my venereal infection. Now, if I may retain my liquids here for one moment. I'd like to continue the 'redundance' of my quote, unquote 'intestinal tract', you see because to preclude on the issue of world domination would only circumvent - excuse me, circumcise the revelation that reflects the 'Afro-disiatic' symptoms which now perpetrates the Jheri Curis activation. Allow me to expose my colon once again. The ramification inflicted on the incision placed within the Fallopian cavities serves to be holistic taken from the Latin word 'jalapeno'."

[9YearLurker]

Exactly.

[Night Hides Not]

The autoschediastic nature of this change will deturpate the SAT.

Quit making fecal matter, bitte. Sie machen meinen Kopf verletzt bist.