In last week's blog I talked about potential changes to the SAT, which will include (according to a College Board president David Coleman) more curriculum-relevant vocabulary and math exercises. Coleman alluded to problems in the current version of the test, including the fact that it consistently under-predicts success for low-income test-takers, and suggested that among the proposed changes would be more efforts to support these high-needs students. (The specific of this plan have yet to be fully disclosed.) A lot of readers had questions about my assertions that the SAT includes vocabulary and math that are disconnected from the subject matter that students are learning in school, and also about my perhaps poor attempts to (succinctly) explain the difference between the SAT and ACT. So I wanted to clarify a couple of my assertions about SAT questions, and also to discuss some of the problems with the test that are perhaps not being addressed by the College Board's SAT overhaul.

The issue of relevance to curriculum is perhaps most visible in the Critical Reading section of the test, which features words such as "perfidious," "vituperated," or "adumbrate"--words Coleman views as esoteric, and wants to replace with ones like "distill" or "synthesis," which would undeniably have a more clear connection to work students are doing in science and history classes. However, in the Math section of the test, the questions' seeming disconnect from coursework has less to do with content than with presentation: Students may struggle to answer math questions that cover skills they have mastered in class but are phrased confusingly, or ask for the type of "one-off" answer wherein a student recognizes he or she must utilize the skill set to, say, solve for X--but the paragraph-long question ultimately asks for X+2. I have found these questions to flummox students who actually are capable of higher-level math, simply because they're accustomed to more straightforward questions.

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