The SAT’s Trust Fall. Legacy standardized-testing firms are cutting rigor to please students.

James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal ^ | June 18, 2025 | Michael Torres

[karpov]

As the policy director for the Classic Learning Test (CLT), I’ve had dozens of conversations with lawmakers across the country about college entrance exams over the last year. Surprisingly, the topic that has drawn the most intense scrutiny has not been the CLT: It’s been changes made to the SAT in 2024 (and similar changes to the ACT being implemented right now).

First, most lawmakers are surprised to learn that the tests change at all. They are then flabbergasted to learn what the most recent changes to the SAT were.

The most noticeable changes were to the structure of the exam. The paper exam was scrapped, and in its place the College Board implemented a computer-based test that is adaptive, meaning students are served easier or harder questions in later portions of each section based on their early performance.

But while these changes were noticeable, they were not the most noteworthy. Many state exams are adaptive, and adaptive testing has been studied by psychometricians for decades. The way adaptive testing was implemented in the new SAT, though, caused eye-popping ripple effects—for those who were looking, that is.

The College Board notes on page 13 of its Digital SAT Suite of Assessments technical framework that two of the primary goals in changing the exam were to make it shorter and to give students more time per question. To make this happen in the new “Reading and Writing” section of the test, they shortened reading passages from 500-750 words all the way down to 25-150 words, or the length of a social-media post, with one question per passage. Their explanation is that this model “operates more efficiently when choices about what test content to deliver are made in small rather than larger units.”

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TOPICS: Education
KEYWORDS: dei; getwokegobroke; sat; standardizedtests

[Recompennation]

Same argument used against the IQ .
Racist is any metric that measures poorly a group foce helt to high esteem?

[Cowgirl of Justice]

They are purposely trying to destroy America by making the children idiots.

See: COMMON CORE

[rx]

“The College Board gets to do what they want, and we have to trust fall into it.”

What are we to make of the meaning of the latter part of that?

[Diogenesis]

They purposely HAVE DESTROYED America by making children idiots.

They should lose their homes, their children,
their pensions, and their freedoms .... to start.

[RoosterRedux]

Professors and administrators could have helped university education adapt to the internet age, but they chose instead to convert their institutions into indoctrination centers.

They committed professional suicide.

[CIB-173RDABN]

They lower the standards to get into college. They offer a bunch of easy degrees that are worthless, loan them money that they know they can not pay back and creates another class of citizens; INDENTURED SERVANTS.

[TalBlack]

This is an old story. The tests to enter medical school were dumbed down beginning in 1970 at the behest of the NAGs who didn’t like that women weren’t scoring well compared to men once the tests had been opened to them. That was 55 long and slow drifting years ago. Probably involved Harvard but I don’t now recall. The feminization of all things continues apace.

Schools that now want to make a name for themselves ought to construct and administer the tests themselves.

[metmom]

The SATs and ACTs are now useless.

They’ve been so dumbed down as to be meaningless.

[Brooklyn Attitude]

So they’ve eliminated the “Standard” from the Standard Aptitude Test. There is no longer a uniform measure of academic achievement, because standards are racist.

[9YearLurker]

They’ve been chipping away at it for generations now, but they speed with which they’ve had to adapt to our now post-literate, post-thinking crop of young is shocking.

[Cowgirl of Justice]

When you hear about the illiteracy rates and how many who ‘graduate’ can’t read or do basic math - it still takes my breath away.

But, the head of the teacher’s union is still walking around angry, fat and happy and fighting to keep the DEA alive as a burning pustule that is destroying America.

IMO

https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/us-literacy-rates-by-state

[Chewbarkah]

My guess is that using the “old” test parameters, the results would be extremely stratefied, with a very flat, low curve for the bottom 90%, the net 5% climbing abruptly, then the top 5% at about the same levels they have always been.

The changes to the test likely generate a better spread for the bottom nine percentiles, affording college evaluators a basis for differentiating among most of the applicants.

[Bon of Babble]

They are twisting themselves into knots to try to narrow or end the achievement gap between White and Asian students and Black students.

The achievement gap is always blamed on “racists” tests like the SAT and ACT.

Eliminating it didn’t help - colleges are backtracking b/c the tests predict college success. Drop-out rates do not look good for them.

[Tired of Taxes]

So, now the SAT sounds similar to the ACCUPLACER, which is a College Board placement test used at community colleges.

This change might not be bad. The ACCUPLACER is a computerized test where you could place as high as Calculus II. (Note: There’s no calculus on the SAT.)

I’ve long believed that universities should give the ACCUPLACER, in lieu of the SAT. However, I also believed the merit scholarships should be saved for the freshmen with high SAT scores because it was a tricky test.

But the SAT was never the end-all be-all that many freepers seem to think it was. The SAT is just a game where you race against the clock as you answer questions and solve brainteasers. If you “win” the game, you have a chance at a scholarship and/or a spot at a top university. A high score means you’ll probably do well in college from the get-go.

A lower score doesn’t mean you’re not ready for college. It just means you didn’t score high in the SAT game. I know many successful people who started at community college and transferred to universities later, or started at state colleges and transferred to Ivies. Or, they skipped college altogether and got filthy rich with no degree at all, but made a fortune through plain old hard work and a mind for business.

I’d withhold judgement on this new SAT for now. I was familiar with the SAT of the 2010s, and people had valid complaints about it. For example, every year, one test section didn’t count toward your score (and you weren’t told which section didn’t count). One year, a scored section was dropped, and the College Board decided to “guesstimate” everyone’s score... until a student filed a lawsuit. Then, remember, some wealthy families were caught cheating. You have to wonder how many cheaters weren’t caught.

Maybe this latest change resolved some of those issues? Waiting for more information...

[Tired of Taxes]

Checking further...

This math tutor discusses the changes to the SAT:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=06Y6OtRj0n8