Five hours of mind-boggling questions, small 5 minute breaks wedged between a course of three painful sections is what College Board qualifies as a aptitude test for college. The SAT is such a nightmare that even signing onto College Board and looking at a poor test score can stress someone out just as much. Ideally, this is no way a college-bound high schooler should spend his/her time. Students stress about practically everything, whether it is a test coming up or nearly getting hit by a car in the parking lot. A test dictating our collegiate future should not be how people decide who will be successful, especially when there are a plethora of other options to dictate collegiate futures. The rumor of the SAT changing is almost too good to be true. The revised test unfairly distributes the academic strengths of certain students, which is going to change admission decisions and how real world application is the most successful route in determining students academic excellence.
Aside from all of the thousands of words they “suggest” a test-taker study, it’s almost a hit-or-miss when someone gets to the test. Just like on their site, it states “The redesigned SAT will focus on relevant words, the meanings of which depend on how they’re used.” This took College Board too long to realize the unnecessary stress of scouring through hundreds of notecards only to exemplify a three-part portion of the exam. Statistically, students only use about 150 words a day to communicate, so what’s the use? Diaphanous or iconoclast are words people are only going to find in a SAT booklet, so the probability of them being utilized is probably closer to zero than one. A college professor is most likely not going to care about the vocabulary used in a paper, especially when someone is talking to a friend, “The shirt I am wearing is so diaphanous, I better change it now!” might just leave the friend dumbfounded because they did not study their flashcards. So, the only benefit a student receives is the merit of guessing and all the admissions officers know is that they are right.
Aside from the crazy vocabulary and the redundant “How many apples does Abigail need to make for her pie?” questions, College Board finally decided real-life situations and moderately used vocabulary might help test scores rise because unrealistic situations are harder to analyze for students. This test is not challenging the mathematics or reading skills of the student, but being able to understand the particular topic.
The margin of students from 2005 to 2015 are going to be the only students who represented the hardest SAT ever made. Not only are they the most competitive group of students, but they are going to be underrepresented when the class of 2016 applies for college.
The real academic plot twist is that about 300 college and universities no longer require standardized testing as part of the admission requirements. Schools like Wake Forest University have moved to more professional means of admission, requiring an interview for applicants. This prevents the student from just applying to random schools, but also allows for the bad test taker to be seen in the limelight who may have a better GPA, compared to the SAT prodigy.
Most students wish that the whole idea of standardized tests would just vanish from existence. It is unfair that most students may have significant flaws in their college application because of the SAT score and taking it a multitude of times not only wears out a brain, it also wears out a wallet. Hooray for the SAT changing, but it does not alter the fact that students who were from the 2005-2015 gap year will not be able to be compared to the same group of students. People can be glad that College Board realized that the difficulty of this test was impractical, but now the application of real world situations in texts will allow colleges to further analyze a students success rather than the area of a triangle inside of a circle.
