Every year, a new crop of high school students will routinely
take the SAT. After this year, the test will be new instead.
This is the last year that the old SAT will be used in UC and
California state university admissions, prompting concerns over
prospective applicants over the uncertain effects these changes are
bringing to the standardized test.
The shift to a new SAT was prompted three years ago by
then-University of California President Richard Atkinson who
criticized the test as a poor indicator of a student’s
academic success and abilities.
Because aspiring UC students are among the largest customers of
the SAT, the College Board, administrators of the SAT, took
Atkinson’s request seriously and began a series of studies
that eventually led to the changing of the SAT and its final
product today.
Michael Brown, chairman of the UC faculty’s Board of
Admissions and Relations with Schools, said the ideal test would
include subjects to which students are actually expected to learn
based on the standards of the UC subject requirements for
acceptance into the system.
In an attempt to satisfy the UC’s criticisms about the
test, the College Board changed the SAT’s verbal section so
that it no longer has analogies and instead has a newly added
writing portion. In the mathematics section, the quantitative
comparisons have been eliminated and are replaced by Algebra
II-level math problems.
Critics of the new three-part SAT argue it is just the original
SAT II in disguise since the current SAT II contains three
sections.
The argument is that the tests have merely swapped
structures.
In a response to some of these concerns, the UC Board of Regents
raised the GPA minimum in their September meeting and no longer
weigh the SAT II twice as heavily as the SAT I, effective for fall
2005 applicants.
BOARS is also currently working to accommodate the change in the
SAT by trying to create a new index to compare ACT scores to SAT
scores.
“BOARS ideally wants a test that better serves education
achievement, a test that catalyzes that achievement and
democratizes that achievement,” Brown said.
UC President Robert Dynes clarified the university’s
admission policy approximately a year ago when he said,
“Comprehensive review is and will remain the policy of the
University of California.” By this, Dynes affirmed that
criteria other than test scores and GPAs are considered in the
admissions process.
Some of this year’s high school juniors, however, still
feel insecure about their chances of acceptance in a UC school
since the new SAT will not be available until March of 2005 “”mdash;
only a few months before their season for applying.
According to BOARS and the College Board, the new SAT has been
designed to function just as earlier versions do, reassuring that
the it isn’t harder or easier, just a better measurement of a
student’s academic achievement than the older version.
“We are working hard to re-evaluate all testing options,
as everything is still tentative. Using the new SAT is not set as
final word. With careful review, we are hoping to release an
in-depth analysis of the new admissions tests and their alignment
with the testing principle no later than 2008,” Brown
said.
Vu Tran, director of undergraduate admissions and relations with
schools at UCLA, said in an e-mail, “The current SAT test is
in for the fall “˜05 cycle and won’t take in effect
until the fall “˜06 cycle. No possible predictions on the
outcome of the introduction of the new test can be made because the
changes won’t effect admissions until fall of
2005.”
Though this transition seems like a smooth one for the
school’s administration, high school students are concerned
about how their future could be effected by the changes in the
SAT.
“Getting into UCLA has become incredibly competitive
academically, and I’m scared because I’m not sure what
to expect from the hyped new SAT test,” said high school
junior Brianna Witherspoon, from San Fernando Valley’s
Birmingham High School.
Witherspoon, like other high school juniors, will have a window
from March 2005 until December 2005 to take the new SAT I and SAT
II subject tests, which produces a time pressure for those students
who wish to take the tests more than once.
“To get into UCLA, I feel like the best of the best is no
longer good enough, and who knows what will happen when I take the
new SAT,” Witherspoon added.