Posted on 07/26/2025 7:33:06 AM PDT by george76
The College Board reduced the Reading and Writing portion of the SAT exam by up to 500 words, arguing the length was nonessential in assessing students' aptitude..
One expert projects the ACT will soon cut its standards as well.
In 2024, the College Board introduced sweeping changes to the Scholastic Assessment Test (SAT), made largely without the awareness of lawmakers.
According to a June 18 op-ed by Michael Torres, the policy director for the Classical Learning Test (CLT), one major change was the format switch from paper to computerized testing. This allows the exam to be adaptable, which means that “students are served easier or harder questions in later portions of each section based on their early performance.”
Torres also notes that the Reading and Writing section of the test shrank from between 500-750 words to anywhere between 25-150 words.
The College Board defended the shortened passages, now approximately the length of a social media post, citing that the ability to read longer passages is “not an essential prerequisite for college.”
...
The College Board continued, claiming that the exam “operates more efficiently when choices about what test content to deliver are made in small rather than larger units.”
As a result, reading material such as passages from U.S. founding documents have been eliminated in order to accommodate “students who might have struggled to connect with the subject matter.”
Additionally, the optional essay was eliminated entirely.
This, Torres chastises, is not holding students to a “clear and rigorous standard,” but is instead an example of the College Board “catering to students’ declining performance and social-media-induced attention-control issues.”
...
The math portion of the exam has faced modifications, as well. In addition to students being offered less questions and the same amount of time to answer them, they may now use a calculator for the entire portion.
One AI model found that the SAT has been getting easier by four points each year since 2008, and the ACT is projected to follow the SAT in its decline of “academic excellence.”
These changes have largely gone unnoticed by lawmakers, Torres explained, and most are “surprised to learn that the tests change at all.”
The movie Idiocracy seems prophetic.
Question 1. Enter your race.
Subsequent questions become harder or easier based on the answer to that previous question.
Better solution - pull copies of the test administered in the 1970s and re-use them. That way there will be a real measure of how far the education industry has sunk in the last 50 years.
K-A-T etc
Thanks to US the bloated, corrupt, political US public-education industrial complex
“””””””As a result, reading material such as passages from U.S. founding documents have been eliminated in order to accommodate “students who might have struggled to connect with the subject matter.” “””””””
So........make it easier for the retards. I always wanted to go to medical school even though I never went to college. It looks like I might be able to do that if they keep dumbing down the requirements.
In 2024, the average total SAT score was 1024 Asian average score 1228,
two or more races average score 1090,
Whites average score 1083
Hispanic students averaged 939
Blacks average score 907
It’s always been on a curve. But I have heard that tests scores at the top are inflated compared to 40 years ago.
We need to put trillions of dollars into education until every human in the country has a PHD!
(The bad news—PHDs will be unable to count their fingers and toes.)
:-)
It mostly doesn’t matter as it is just used to compare students rather than some absolute measure of knowledge. If student A beats student B 1250 - 1100 on a harder test or 1400 - 1300 on an easier test tells the same story, A is better than B on the SAT
Public Schools.
College is a bad idea for most people. Learn a trade instead, or get hired at a company with On The Job training. Society should actively move in this direction, minimizing the importance of college.
For those who want to go to college — bring back the SAT from, say, 1970. If your score is bad, no college for you.
Last year I couldn’t even spell ophthamologist now I is one.
I was listening to this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QvfCHPCeoPw
Shawn Ryan interviewed Alexandr Wang, the 28 year old billionaire CEO of Scale AI who founded his company after dropping out of MIT.
His parents are disappointed he did not stay in college like his brothers.
Lol.
The modern K12 education solution!
Make the test easier and shorter.
“If student A beats student B 1250 - 1100 on a harder test or 1400 - 1300 on an easier test tells the same story, A is better than B on the SAT”
That’s true, but isn’t what the article is saying. The smarter student gets the harder test, the dumber student gets the easier test — and (hopefully, according to the College Board) a HIGHER SCORE than the student who is actually smarter.
Changing the SAT certainly makes sense if we have to cater to people like Claire and Campus reform.
Being an old guy, there is a growing list of things that I am happy I don’t have to give a hoot about any more. The SATs is on that list.
My grandkids are in a private school, with two parents with advanced degrees, good jobs, and a strong marriage. I am pretty sure they are going to be just fine.
So, yeah....I don’t care about the SATS. They could change them to a 15 minute blood test to measure intelligent DNA and it would not matter at all.
And really....as the population attending college drops like a rock—and colleges continue going out of business does anyone really think they are going to get more selective? The SATs will lose their stranglehold on college admissions.
My score of 1250 in 1983 would probably be in the 1500’s on today’s difficulty levels.
Kind of like those websites that describe the value of money adjusted for inflation. “$25,000 in 1983 is equivalent in purchasing power to about $80,600 today” LOL
let’em type those answers with their thumbs, on a small screen. That should help...
Or, maybe revamp the whole education system to return to older plans and processes; like reading, writing, and math.
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