College Board shortens SAT as student performance declines
The College Board reduced the Reading and Writing portion of the SAT exam by up to 500 words, arguing the length was nonessential in assessing students' aptitude.
One expert projects the ACT will soon cut its standards as well.
In 2024, the College Board introduced sweeping changes to the Scholastic Assessment Test (SAT), made largely without the awareness of lawmakers.
According to a June 18 op-ed by Michael Torres, the policy director for the Classical Learning Test (CLT), one major change was the format switch from paper to computerized testing. This allows the exam to be adaptable, which means that “students are served easier or harder questions in later portions of each section based on their early performance.”
Torres also notes that the Reading and Writing section of the test shrank from between 500-750 words to anywhere between 25-150 words.
The College Board defended the shortened passages, now approximately the length of a social media post, citing that the ability to read longer passages is “not an essential prerequisite for college.”
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The College Board continued, claiming that the exam “operates more efficiently when choices about what test content to deliver are made in small rather than larger units.”
As a result, reading material such as passages from U.S. founding documents have been eliminated in order to accommodate “students who might have struggled to connect with the subject matter.”
Additionally, the optional essay was eliminated entirely.
This, Torres chastises, is not holding students to a “clear and rigorous standard,” but is instead an example of the College Board “catering to students’ declining performance and social-media-induced attention-control issues.”
[RELATED: Millions of students dropped out as higher ed shifted focus from degrees to DEI]
The math portion of the exam has faced modifications, as well. In addition to students being offered less questions and the same amount of time to answer them, they may now use a calculator for the entire portion.
One AI model found that the SAT has been getting easier by four points each year since 2008, and the ACT is projected to follow the SAT in its decline of “academic excellence.”
These changes have largely gone unnoticed by lawmakers, Torres explained, and most are “surprised to learn that the tests change at all.”
Campus Reform has reached out to the College Board for comment. This article will be updated accordingly.
