Press Releases
College Board adds written essay to SAT exam
NEW YORK — Heeding calls that the SAT should measure what students learn in class, College Board trustees voted Thursday to add an essay to the nation’s most widely used college entrance exam, toughen its math section and eliminate analogy questions.
The head of the 170,000-student University of California system had at one point suggested dropping the SAT as an admissions requirement, arguing it failed to test student knowledge. But Richard Atkinson, president of the UC system, said he was delighted with the makeover and called it “a major event in the history of standardized testing.”
College Board President Gaston Caperton said the new test, to be introduced in March 2005, “will be more aligned with curriculum and more aligned with state standards. I want you to think of this as a test of basic success skills, of reading, writing and math, connected with reasoning.”
This is the second major revision in less than a decade for the exam, taken at least once by 1.3 million of last year’s high school graduates. The last reform also was aimed at better reflecting students’ mastery of classroom subjects.
College Board officials said that some of the latest revisions had been proposed but not adopted in that 1994 revamping.NEW YORK — Heeding calls that the SAT should measure what students learn in class, College Board trustees voted Thursday to add an essay to the nation’s most widely used college entrance exam, toughen its math section and eliminate analogy questions.
The head of the 170,000-student University of California system had at one point suggested dropping the SAT as an admissions requirement, arguing it failed to test student knowledge. But Richard Atkinson, president of the UC system, said he was delighted with the makeover and called it “a major event in the history of standardized testing.”
College Board President Gaston Caperton said the new test, to be introduced in March 2005, “will be more aligned with curriculum and more aligned with state standards. I want you to think of this as a test of basic success skills, of reading, writing and math, connected with reasoning.”
This is the second major revision in less than a decade for the exam, taken at least once by 1.3 million of last year’s high school graduates. The last reform also was aimed at better reflecting students’ mastery of classroom subjects.
College Board officials said that some of the latest revisions had been proposed but not adopted in that 1994 revamping.
