Big changes to the SAT

The coronavirus pandemic is hastening sweeping changes to the SAT college entrance exam. The College Board, which produces the test, said that to reduce demands on beleaguered students, the general exam would no longer contain an optional essay section. And subject-matter tests will cease in the United States, too.

“The pandemic accelerated a process already underway,” the organization said in a statement.

Standardized testing — once a given in a college application — has taken a hit since the pandemic started. The College Board tried and failed to quickly create a test that could be taken digitally at home, although it said it was still continuing to work on the project with the aim of offering proctored versions at testing centers. And many colleges dropped the requirement that students take the test, as well as its competitor the ACT — a trend driven in part by concerns about equity that received a boost during the pandemic.

The pandemic has also raised safety concerns about testing. Our colleague Emma Goldberg took the SAT in September, as testing centers closed around her. The airborne virus heightened an already stressful experience.

“Normally you’d have this foreboding sense that comes from taking a test in a room with 100 other students,” a fellow test-taker, Nikola Kasarskis, 17, told Emma. “Now, instead, you have this foreboding sense of taking the test in a room with someone who might have a deadly virus. I don’t know what’s worse.”

Critics of the College Board said the decision to drop the subject tests and essay was almost certainly driven by financial considerations. (In the past, the SAT has represented a substantial portion of the College Board’s more than $1 billion in annual revenue.)

Now the board may be pivoting its economic strategy, the critics said: The College Board also administers Advanced Placement tests and cited the tests’ “expanded reach” in the decision to cancel the SAT subject tests.

The chief executive officer of the College Board, David Coleman, said the organization’s decision was not a financial one, and its goal was to eliminate redundant exams.

“Anything that can reduce unnecessary anxiety and get out of the way is of huge value to us,” he said.

But a greater focus on A.P. scores may only increase pressure on high school students. They have to take those tests by the end of junior year for colleges to see their scores, pushing the laborious college admissions process even earlier into adolescence. Pencils down, masks up.