The SAT’s Trust Fall

As the policy director for the Classic Learning Test (CLT), I’ve had dozens of conversations with lawmakers across the country about college entrance exams over the last year. Surprisingly, the topic that has drawn the most intense scrutiny has not been the CLT: It’s been changes made to the SAT in 2024 (and similar changes to the ACT being implemented right now).

First, most lawmakers are surprised to learn that the tests change at all. They are then flabbergasted to learn what the most recent changes to the SAT were.

The way adaptive testing was implemented in the new SAT caused eye-popping ripple effects—for those who were looking, that is. The most noticeable changes were to the structure of the exam. The paper exam was scrapped, and in its place the College Board implemented a computer-based test that is adaptive, meaning students are served easier or harder questions in later portions of each section based on their early performance.

But while these changes were noticeable, they were not the most noteworthy. Many state exams are adaptive, and adaptive testing has been studied by psychometricians for decades. The way adaptive testing was implemented in the new SAT, though, caused eye-popping ripple effects—for those who were looking, that is.

Being able to pay attention to texts of extended length should indeed be a prerequisite for college. The College Board notes on page 13 of its Digital SAT Suite of Assessments technical framework that two of the primary goals in changing the exam were to make it shorter and to give students more time per question. To make this happen in the new “Reading and Writing” section of the test, they shortened reading passages from 500-750 words all the way down to 25-150 words, or the length of a social-media post, with one question per passage. Their explanation is that this model “operates more efficiently when choices about what test content to deliver are made in small rather than larger units.”

This resulted in the elimination of significant portions of SAT’s previously used reading material, including “passages in the U.S. founding documents/Great Global Conversation subject area,” because of their “extended length.” Nevertheless, the College Board takes the view that the rigor of the Reading and Writing segment is unchanged. They claim in the assessment framework that the eliminated reading passages are “not an essential prerequisite for college” and that the new, shorter content helps “students who might have struggled to connect with the subject matter.”

I beg to differ. Given the challenges professors are now experiencing with students’ college-level literacy and attention spans, one may counter that being able to pay attention to and analyze texts of extended length on complex subject matters that one may not find immediately entertaining should indeed be a prerequisite for college. And an objective and consistent standardized exam is a valuable means to measure such ability, especially amidst the rise of rampant high-school grade inflation.

But, rather than hold students to a clear and rigorous standard, the College Board is catering to students’ declining performance and social-media-induced attention-control issues.

This extends to the changes made in the new SAT math section, as well. College Board now serves test-takers fewer questions but did not reduce the amount of time for the section correspondingly. Students taking the post-2024 SAT now have 1.6 minutes per question, compared to 1.3 minutes on the 2015-2024 SAT. (The ACT and CLT provide 1.1 minutes per question.) Additionally, a calculator can now be used for the entirety of the SAT math section.

It’s hard to predict the extent to which these changes may decrease the rigor of the SAT math section. However, they comport with a more than 15-year trend. Researchers at the University of Cincinnati trained an AI program to do SAT math questions going back to 2008, and it found that the test has been getting easier by about four points per year.

Finally, the optional essay was eliminated completely.

These changes result in a measurably different test. Consider this: The new SAT Reading and Writing section correlates with the pre-2024 SAT Reading and Writing section at a rate of only 0.85 to 0.86, according to the SAT’s internal concordance provided in their framework. Meanwhile, the ACT’s “Reading” and “English” sections and the CLT’s “Verbal Reasoning” and “Grammar/Writing” sections correlate with the pre-2024 SAT’s Reading and Writing section at rates of 0.884 and 0.9, respectively. In other words, the ACT and CLT correlate with the old SAT better than the current SAT does.

Students, high-school administrators, and college admissions staff have no choice but to accept the changes each company makes. This may change for the ACT, however. The company began implementing several significant changes in April of this year, which seem to mirror the new SAT.

For the most part, the content-level changes made to the SAT have garnered little pushback. Concerns that have been raised have focused primarily on the test being computer-based rather than paper-based. A likely reason for this seeming indifference is that, well, what can anyone do about it?

“The College Board gets to do what they want, and we have to trust fall into it.” “The College Board gets to do what they want, and we have to trust fall into it,” Jennifer Jessie, a Virginia-based college counselor, told ChalkBeat last year.

The College Board and ACT have lobbied state lawmakers for decades to secure a monopoly or duopoly position in every state. Besides the tests’ usually optional use for college admission (though 80 percent of applicants still take the exams, and usually only low-performing test-takers choose to withhold scores), test scores are often tied to state-funded scholarships, required for high-school graduation, used to fulfill federal K-12 testing requirements, and more. By setting policies that disallow competition, lawmakers mistakenly tie a consistent mandate to an exam that changes dramatically.

Worse, this means in practice that students, high-school administrators, and college admissions staff who’d like to make use of a college-level exam have no choice but to accept the changes each company makes, even if policymakers had a stronger version of the exams in mind when writing the law.

Take Texas. Years ago, lawmakers there tied the state’s automatic admission policy for public colleges and universities to an SAT score of 1500 out of 2400. But the SAT eliminated its 2400-point scoring scale with its major 2015 re-write (just 10 years after its 2005 rewrite established that scale in the first place). This means Texas students have been fighting for automatic admission to the state’s prestigious schools with an SAT scale that hasn’t existed for a decade. (Thankfully, Texas Sen. Mayes Middleton and Rep. Terri Leo-Wilson recognized the problems inherent in the state’s policy and passed a reform this year that gives the CLT an opportunity to compete.)

One might hope that America’s two biggest college-level testing companies would use their position of power to push for higher standards—competing to be the exam that best reveals exceptional students. Instead, the opposite is the case.

As test-optional college-admission policies have proliferated, the College Board and ACT seem to have reacted with a bit of panic. Rather than offer a consistent standard of academic excellence, these companies are competing to offer the least unpleasant product to 17-year-olds.

“If we’re launching a test that is largely optional, how do we make it the most attractive option possible?” Priscilla Rodriguez, College Board senior vice president of college readiness assessments, told Chalk Beat in an article about the changes. “If students are deciding to take a test, how do we make the SAT the one they want to take?”

It is our hope at CLT that this unfortunate reality is set to change in favor of rigor and merit.

In contrast to the new SAT, the CLT tests students’ reading, writing, and grammar achievement by using texts from some of the most influential, intellectually substantive books ever written. Our author bank includes classic works of literature, philosophy, history, religion, and the sciences from Plato to Frederick Douglass and from Euclid to Albert Einstein. Meanwhile, our math section includes more questions on the most challenging subject areas (geometry and trigonometry) than do the other exams. CLT also tests students’ fundamental knowledge of complex arithmetic. And calculators are not allowed.

At CLT, we believe a core purpose of standardized testing is to hold students to a high standard, not to hold standards to what pleases students. Lawmakers in several states have begun to recognize the value of this goal and have altered policy to allow the CLT to compete with the SAT and ACT. We look forward to more state lawmakers doing the same.

Michael Torres is director of legislative strategy at Classic Learning Test.