Upcoming SAT Change Predictions (Part 2): Content

In Part 1 of the New SAT Change Predictions, I discussed what potential changes to the structure of the SAT might mean for students and their test prep.  In addition, another potential change to the SAT would be not in its structure and format, but in its content and concepts tested.

What if the College Board changes the content of the SAT?

1. Common core

With the push for schools across the nation to adopt the “common core” standards, there is reason to believe that the SAT will try and align its content with what high schools are now recognizing as universal qualities needed for a student to enter a university.  What these changes could mean for the SAT and students preparing for the SAT:

Continued focus on vocabulary: the common core places an emphasis on students having a wide and developed understanding of English vocabulary.  Should the SAT shift towards aligning with the common core, the vocabulary portion of the exam will likely remain, and perhaps even see an increased emphasis.  Addition of vocabulary only questions (meaning they do not test reasoning skills), such as synonym or antonym questions, could make an appearance.  This would force students to begin studying vocabulary at a much earlier stage and would require student vocabulary to have more breadth, as there are few tricks to be learned for vocabulary only questions.

Increased use of charts, graphs, and multimedia analysis: one of the most significant aspects of the common core standards is increasing students’ abilities to understand charts, graphs and other multimedia representations of data. The SAT has a very limited representation of charts and graphs currently, so should the SAT take after the GMAT and add in a section of chart and graph reasoning, students will need to work with a tutor to learn all of the content associated with reading graphs and charts quickly.  Especially important will be learning the common tricks standardized tests employ in reading graphs, such as switching axis, mixing up raw data and percents, staggered axes and more.

Global texts: another aspect of the common core is integrating a more diverse group of writing into students’ repertoire of texts. Students preparing for today’s SAT find themselves working to become familiar with the passage types seen on the test, such as figure analysis, straw man arguments, character sketches and personal growth experiences.  However, should the test attempt to incorporate more diverse texts from a more global group, students will be unable to identify passage type based on these clues.  Students may need to recognize and understand passages written in old English, or based on the history and customs of another culture.  This will put students who are well read at a significant advantage to students who don’t frequently read outside of school, and this advantage will be much more challenging to mitigate with test prep strategies than the current SAT.

Reasoning: for the math portion of the test, students will likely see a shift towards questions that test the reasoning behind solving, as opposed to actually solving.  This would likely mean answer choices that are variables, lists of steps, or “anything except” questions as opposed to numbers.  Students who excelled in geometric proofs will be likely to excel on these questions, and those who struggled will need an “educational therapy” approach to training their mind to approach math from a “why” instead of “how” approach.   Tutors who are preparing students may have to take students further back to fill in any knowledge gaps, as knowing content and tricks will not be enough to answer these questions if the student doesn’t understand the process involved.

2. Argument analysis

Another potential content shift would be towards questions that encourage students to be able to effectively analyze an argument.  Questions of this type have been appearing more and more frequently in recent tests, which could indicate a “trial” period of a question that will soon have its own place on the SAT.  This common question type, seen on the GMAT, GRE and LSAT, requires students to understand the basics of an argument and then answer questions on how to strengthen/weaken the argument, what assumption the argument relies on, and identify potential flaws in the argument.  Students who do not “innately” understand this process will require extensive experience in learning the skills associated with this question type.  Furthermore, students who have studied an IB curriculum would be at an advantage to other students.

Conclusion

However the test does end up changing, there is sure to be a flurry as test prep companies rush to keep up.  However, the test will likely not revolutionize standardized testing and is more likely to adopt some of the more successful formats and question types of other standardized tests.  For this reason, tutors and companies with a broad wealth of knowledge of standardized tests will certainly have a leg up.