The SAT definitely has been dumbed down on the verbal side over the years (e.g., 1. hard vocabulary words have been eliminated, 2. analogy questions have been eliminated, 3. more context is now being given in the text of the text itself to allow the test-takers to figure out on the fly what hard or unfamiliar words mean, etc.). As a result, many students can score much higher on the verbal SAT than in years past without having worked hard over the years (or even in the months prior to the SAT test administration) to attain and maintain an excellent vocabulary. So those students with top vocabularies are finding this is not as much an advantage to them as it was for SAT test-takers two or three decades ago (i.e., less proficient students are readily getting the same or close to the same scores as they are getting). It doesn’t appear, however, that this is the case on the math SAT sections. The math SAT is still very challenging. Perhaps many of the Ridgewood High School students benefiting the most from SAT tutoring are making up for not working as hard as they should have in math from grade 6 or 7 onward, or for having had teachers or lower level classes during those grades that didn’t challenge them or that didn’t prepare them adequately to score very well on the math sections of the SAT.
The old saw that the SAT is a test that you can’t study for is still that: an old, false saw. Perfect or near perfect scores were once a rarity, perhaps because students were (wrongly, as it turns out) warded away from preparing in a focused, methodical way. Now, however, admissions offices at the nation’s top-rated colleges are swimming in applications from students sporting such gaudy scores. Fully a quarter or more of freshmen matriculating at places like Yale or Princeton totally body-slammed the SAT. Hence, schools who informally market themselves the “Harvard of the South” or similar monikers that identify them as non-Ivy League, but striving for recognition and a healthy share of the rest of the best students, are competing heavily for students with those kinds of obscenely high scores by offering large merit-based scholarships. But, and this is a big but, those same schools are prone very quickly to lose interest in students who do not score perfectly or near-perfectly on the SAT. Respect for the SAT as a tool for admissions offices to make fine distinctions between and among good students has plummetted. Many detractors of the SAT see it merely as a narrowly-focused test of a certain raw academic-related skills, perhaps predictive of first year college performance, but of no real value beyond that. The ACT, by contrast, has a much different format. The ACT is broken down by subject matter and gives admissions offices a good idea how much of the pure substance of a given academic subject a student has ingested and comprehended. The ACT’s popularity among college-bound high school students is increasing as more and more people recognize the real weaknesses of the SAT.
This is also great for SAT tutors…
They can point to themselves to justify higher scores which came about by way of dumbing down the test.
Yes yes yes we all know you tools use this outdated testing method to get junior into an Ivey because you actually think that means something. It doesn’t .
I’ve had plenty of “juniors” stand in front of me during an interview extolling their SAT stats and their fancy sheepskin but when I simply ask ” what can you do for me today”? Right now? What do you think of this Gantt chart? How well versed are you in Salesforce?
Hello?
I really don’t care how many frames you have on your wall with that fancy paper.
I want to know what you can do for me TODAY.
I loved the analogy questions!