Scholastic Aptitude Test measures high school
students’ grammar, writing and math knowledge

By DEBRA CANO RAMOS, Special Advertising Sections Writer

Caitlin Marsh, 16, excels in math and science and wants to be an engineer. English and writing, however, are not her favorite subjects — and it showed when the San Clemente High School student took the new Scholastic Aptitude Test, better known as the SAT, in March.

“I thought the math and grammar sections were pretty easy. But, the critical reading was difficult for me. The material they used was uninteresting and not the type of reading I would do,” said Marsh, who will be a senior in the fall at the Orange County school.

Gabriel Budin-Smithers, also 16, wants to become a medical doctor and was confident in his writing abilities when he took the new SAT, but found the math difficult.

“My weakness repeatedly proved to be math. I spent most of my time taking practice tests for the math sections so that I could understand the word problems faster and solve more of the higher difficulty problems,” said Budin-Smithers, an incoming senior at Oak Park High School in Ventura County.

Both students took the SAT in March, the first time the new version was administered. A total of 1.2 million students nationwide took the test at the first three administrations, including 165,000 students in California, according to the College Board, which owns the SAT.

The new SAT, first introduced in 1926 and last revised in 1994, has three main sections: math, critical reading and writing.

Major changes are found in the new math section, which includes topics from third-year college preparatory math and eliminates quantitative comparisons that were on the old test.

The writing section requires a studentwritten essay and, the critical reading section, formerly known as the verbal section, now has long and short reading passages and analogies have been eliminated.

The SAT, a standardized measure of a student’s college readiness, was changed to better reflect what students are learning in high school, and to include writing, which is an important skill for success in college and beyond, said Brian O’Reilly, the College Board’s executive director of SAT Information Services. “The SAT is what we call a reasoning test. It assumes you’ve learned a certain amount in classes up to now,” O’Reilly said. “It assumes that you have had a basic high school curriculum, and, now that you have learned it, can you apply it?”

As the nation’s leading college admission test, about 80% of colleges and universities require the test as one of the many factors in admissions decisions, O’Reilly said. Typically, college-bound high school juniors and seniors take the test — and many take the test more than once, O’Reilly said.

However, many colleges waive the SAT requirement for returning adult students, so it is wise to check with the college or university before taking the test, O’Reilly said.

Each of the new SAT’s three main sections is scored on a scale of 200 to 800, with the top score 2,400 (compared to 1,600 on the old test). O’Reilly added that the College Board encourages colleges to look at scores of the main sections separately to better gauge a student’s academic abilities in each of the areas.

The most dramatic change in the test is the addition of the writing section, designed to assess general writing skills with standard written English.

“We’ve been trying to add writing for the last 10 years,” O’Reilly said.

Because of advances in technology, the handwritten test essays can now be scanned into a computer and electronically transmitted to professional readers (high school teachers and college faculty). Readers can score essays at a local SAT scoring center or on their home computer.

The writing section includes multiple-choice questions to measure a student’s ability to identify sentence errors and improve sentences and paragraphs. Students also are asked to write an essay in 25 minutes, which requires them to take a position on an issue and measures their ability to think critically and develop ideas in a thoughtful, cogent and coherent way.

“Students are graded on not just how well they write, but how well they think and logically lay out the issues,” O’Reilly said.

Essays are scored using a “holistic approach,” in which the piece of writing is considered as a “total work,” the whole of which is greater than the sum of its parts, according to the College Board. The essay is treated like a rough draft and is graded as such by two readers. Spelling and grammar errors may not affect a score unless they are so pervasive that they get in the way of the reader understanding the essay, O’Reilly said.

Richard Sterling, executive director of the National Writing Project, founded in 1974 to improve the teaching of writing, agrees that it was necessary to revise the test to include writing.

Sterling said that it would likely encourage high schools to place more emphasis on good writing skills.

The new SAT writing section helps to draw attention to the importance of teaching writing in the schools, as well as the need for students to know how to write in today’s workplace, Sterling said.

The SAT is offered seven times a year — in October, November, December, January, March, May and June — at test centers across the country. Most test centers are located at high schools, but also in-clude colleges. In the Southern California area, there are more than 100 test centers.

Registration is done centrally on the College Board’s website, www.collegeboard.com, or students can mail in their registrations. Students also can find a local test site on the College Board website. The test costs $41.50, which includes four score reports sent to colleges.

Free practice tests are offered on the College Board’s website and through publications distributed to high schools. The College Board also has developed an online course to prepare for the SAT for $69.95, which includes three practice tests and more than 600 questions.

And, The College Board’s “Official SAT Study Guide” is available on the test maker’s website and at bookstores for $19.95. Debra Cano Ramos is a freelance writer based in Orange.

Debra Cano Ramos is a freelance writer based in Orange.

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