The College Board today will release many details of its revised SAT, including sample questions and explanations of the research, the goals and the specifications behind them.
“We are committed to a clear and open SAT, and today is the first step in that commitment,” Cyndie Schmeiser, the College Board’s chief of assessment, said in a conference call Monday, previewing the changes to be introduced in spring 2016.
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, instead of the current required one, in which students will be asked to analyze a text and how the author builds an argument.
While the current test allows the use of calculators, the new one will have some sections that do not allow calculators. Also, instead of five multiple-choice answers, the new test will have four.
Front Section, Pages 4 on 04/16/2014