how is this different?

this is a noteworthy shift from the old sat, and from the current act. the former did not have this element of predictability, and the later still doesn’t. now, standardized tests are inherently predictable in their question structure and subject matter, but anything we can do to have precognition of the specific passages and focuses will make the test more familiar and friendly to us.
 

in the old days…

the sat drew passages “from college-level reading sources and [were] adapted to make them fit easily into the 700 words or so” as lucas fink says in another magoosh post.  but as most high-school students are not huge consumers of  “college-level reading,” there’s a low likelihood that test-takers would have seen the material previously.

enter the new sat.

among the myriad discussions of the impact of “only four answer choices” and praise for the elimination of the “guessing penalty”* there is no mention of the starkest change: the college board has given explicit indication that it will draw new passages from us-centric documents.

the new sat is saying “no” to passages about the history of dewey decimal system and “yes” to founding documents: materials produced by or about founding fathers and civil rights leaders. the college board says,

on each assessment, one passage will be drawn from a u.s. founding document (a text such as the declaration of independence, the constitution, or the bill of rights) or a text that is part of the great global conversation (a text such as one by lincoln or king, or by an author from outside the united states writing on a topic such as freedom, justice, or liberty).

while the great global conversation sounds like a mildly interesting youtube live-stream event, i fear the truth is more along the lines of, “how do we be the change we want to see in the world?” or some other quote you’d expect to see on your high school counselor’s cat poster.
 

why does this matter?

the more predictable the sat is, the easier it becomes. and now, the college board has told us exactly what to expect on the reading section.
 

how can i maximize points, using this?

take ap us history instead of ap european or ap world history. for the first time, a high school class besides math will have a direct applicability on the sat. students who spend a year studying us history will have a very high likelihood of encountering a passage that will appear on the sat. if you haven’t seen the specific passage, then chances are you at least know the context of it. imagine studying us history and then seeing a letter written by martin luther king, jr. even if you haven’t seen the letter before, you know so much about the context of the life and times, that you will have a clear advantage over students who do not have that same body of knowledge.

need a quick refresher on your us history? start here, and then skim this list of documents which i predict the new sat will draw from for its reading passages.

by making sure your curriculum is rich in material that is likely to be on the sat you improve your likelihood of success in both the ap us history test and the sat, as the overlap will make you stronger in both.

*the elimination of a “guessing penalty” is of no benefit to test-takers, as the test is scaled, and this change effects all test-takers equally. for example, if an accuracy level of 75% used to scale to the 95th percentile, now an accuracy level of 80% will scale to the 95th percentile. the 5% gap in accuracy will be the 5% gained by guessing.
 

the post the “a” in sat stands for american appeared first on magoosh blog | high school.

although much has been written comparing and contrasting the new and old sat, the new sat and the act, and every other conceivable combination, there’s been relatively little discussion of the behind-the-scenes repercussions of having a brand new test.

by now you know you can expect to see more statistics, less geometry, and literally thousands of more words overall. but what you may not realize is that there are some scoring and logistical implications of taking the new sat.
 

what goes on behind the curtain, anyway?

let’s focus on the scoring first. the college board has always been secretive about what exactly happens in those 21 days between exam and results-delivery, but we know a few things:

• the test is not “curved.” a truly curved test would force a predefined number of students into each score bracket—something we empirically know doesn’t happen.
• questions are emphasized or deemphasized depending on how they’re received. if everyone misses a question, it’s thrown out. if everyone gets it right, it’s reclassified with a lower difficulty level.
• normalization occurs: to “ensures that your score is not affected by different forms of the test or other test-takers’ ability levels”

the abnormalities of normalization

that last point is the one we’ll pay special attention to. how does the college board ensure that my score is not affected by different forms (dates) of the test? they scale it up or down depending on where the average score falls. but how would they do that if they didn’t have a long history of tests to compare the average to?
 

benchmarking to a moving target

that’s exactly the case we find ourselves in, coming into the march 2016 new sat. so to create a benchmark, the college board is going to look to two data sources to scale the march test  against:

• experimental sections from pre-march ’16 sats. if you took the sat over the past couple of years, you would have noticed that there was an extra section that usually didn’t match any of the others. it was different in difficulty, format, question-structure, and timing. this was a section from the new sat that the college board was introducing to collect data on. this is good in theory, except that students had no idea what they were seeing, and probably performed terribly on this new, foreign section. certain test prep providers (myself included) told students that if they could identify the experimental section, they should bubble straight “c”s and take a nap (knowing it wouldn’t affect their overall score). i wonder what that will do to the validity of that experimental section. please note, the new sat does not have an experimental section, so do not try to find it and certainly do not sleep through it.
• may 2016 sats. the college board is not going to release march 2016 results until they see may 2016 data, so that they have another data point to scale the tests against.

the upside of uncertainty

so how does this affect the march 2016 test-taker? there are indications that he can expect a slight score inflation. when you compare a score of a prepared test taker to the scores of people who took the test (as an experimental section) completely unprepared, your score should look stronger. i would not expect to see 800s in place of 600s, but in a time where admissions decisions can come down to tens of points on sats, every little bit counts.

furthermore, when the college board last introduced a new sat, in 2005, the first year’s scores were the highest on record. the average score declined steadily every year after. this corroborates the theory that scaling takes time, and that the variance is usually positive for the early-adopters.

hopefully this new perspective puts a spring in your step, and lets you enter your testing facility with confidence instead of worry. you’ll do great!
 

the post when to take the sat: the first-mover advantage appeared first on magoosh blog | high school.