Biggest Overhaul of SAT Test in 50 Years Planned : Education: Planners hope to make the widely used college admissions exam more relevant, less coachable.

The Scholastic Aptitude Test, long the bane of college-bound students, soon may be undergoing its biggest overhaul in 50 years. Planners hope to make the nation’s most widely used college admissions examination more relevant to classroom learning and less coachable, while possibly easing criticism that the SAT is biased against women and minorities.

Among the proposed changes are the addition of a written essay, introduction of mathematical questions without any hints from multiple-choice answers, more vocabulary testing based on reading passages instead of isolated word exercises and even permitting the use of calculators. In all, the three-hour test will probably contain fewer separate questions than it does now.

“It’s an instrument that has served colleges well, but it’s time for a new look,” Alice Cox, the University of California official who will become chairwoman of the College Board trustees in October, said of the SAT. The College Board sponsors the SAT and the trustees are expected to vote on proposed test changes at a Sept. 27-28 meeting at their New York headquarters.

Over the last two years, new versions of the SAT have been tested on more than 100,000 high school and college students throughout the nation and have proven to be as good or better than the current SAT in predicting academic success in college, according to College Board officials. Still, any approved changes would require further field testing and would not be fully implemented until 1994.

Any changes are sure to have enormous effect on American education. The SAT was taken by 1.75 million students last year, mainly on the West and East coasts. (The rival American College Testing exam, which had 1.3 million takers, dominates the Midwest and underwent major reforms last year.)

The SAT is a rite of passage for high school students, many of whom think that good scores are a key to a successful life. Although such importance is exaggerated, colleges do use the SAT as one of the most important items in judging applicants, and the average score of a university’s freshman class is viewed as a measurement of prestige. SAT scores are used to award scholarships and, in some states, to review performance of teachers and school systems. Some high schools even match curricula to the test.

Steven Graff, director of what the College Board calls its New Possibilities project, said the proposed changes would make the test-taking tactics taught by expensive coaching services less useful. “Yes, we say you can prepare but you’d be better off to do the day-to-day things in the classroom: reading critically and writing productively,” he said.

The possible revisions come at a time when the SAT is under intense scrutiny because the scores of white males remain significantly higher than those of women, Latinos and blacks, although that gap has closed a bit in recent years.

In February, 1989, a federal judge in New York said that the state’s use of the SAT as the exclusive criterion to award scholarships discriminated against women. The College Board insists the test was never intended for such use and should only be considered along with school grades and class rankings. Socioeconomic and educational backgrounds, not the test itself, cause those score gaps, the College Board maintains.

Some of the SAT changes are being proposed because of technological advances in optical scanners, allowing for more sophisticated grading. So, about 20% of multiple-choice math questions may be replaced with exercises that require the recording of actual answers, without the benefit of choices, on a more complicated grid. Students would still be required to use only the traditional No. 2 pencil.

While many other proposals face likely approval, letting test-takers use calculators is more controversial. Beyond any educational concerns, low-income students could be handicapped because they can’t afford calculators, some College Board trustees say.

Other changes, such as the written essay and longer reading texts, are responses to demands from high schools and colleges for better gauges of classroom abilities. Frank Burtnett, executive director of the National Assn. of College Admission Counselors, based in Alexandria, Va., said such changes would be welcomed by his members.

But some experts contend that whatever the College Board does next month will be insufficient. “Our feeling is that the SAT needs to be comprehensively overhauled to eliminate its misuses, irrelevance and bias. This is not it,” said Sarah Stockwell, an official at the National Center for Fair and Open Testing, a public advocacy group in Cambridge, Mass., that has been severely critical of many testing programs.

The current SAT test has two main multiple-choice sections, each graded from a minimum of 200 points to a perfect 800 score: Verbal, which measures reading and reasoning abilities, and math, which stresses problem-solving in arithmetic, geometry and algebra. It also has a smaller multiple-choice section, known as the test of Standard Written English, which measures knowledge of grammar and is graded on a scale from 20 points to 60+.

Because the grammar section is widely thought to be insufficient, some colleges additionally require the separate and very thorough English Composition Achievement test. But that achievement test requires an extra fee and is offered only once a year, compared to the six SAT sittings each year.

Under consideration is a plan to create a third 200-800-point SAT section by combining the current grammar questions with an essay. The SAT began in 1926 as an all-essay test, but essays were gradually phased out by the early 1940s when the multiple-choice format took over.

In the remaining verbal section, some traditional exercises such as choosing antonyms from a list of words would be revised to place the words in sentences and paragraphs. Throughout all reading sections, language would be changed from what critics describe as stilted “testspeak” to more natural texts that resemble passages from real schoolbooks and magazines, according to officials at the Educational Testing Service, the Princeton, N.J., firm that designs the SAT for the College Board.

Worth David, dean of undergraduate admissions at Yale University, said the addition of a writing sample taken under timed circumstances “would be wonderful” because there is no way for sure to tell whether a student received adult help on the essays in Yale’s application.

But David and other educators worry how SAT essays can be adequately graded and how much that would add to the test fee, now $16. Graff, of the College Board, declined to speculate on fee increases related to the SAT revisions but said the changes will cost “in the millions of dollars just to bring a new test to the desk of students.”

More concern is being raised by Latino and Asian groups, particularly in California, that a required essay would hurt the college admissions chances of immigrants for whom English is a second language. Such prominent California politicians as state Assembly Speaker Willie Brown (D-San Francisco) and state Sen. Art Torres (D-Los Angeles), chairman of the Senate Special Committee on UC Admissions, have taken up that cause.

In a recent letter to the College Board, Brown described the possible introduction of an essay “a disturbing development” and asked for evidence that it would improve predictions of college success for low-income and minority students. Torres has proposed legislation that would force exam companies to measure the effect on women and minorities of any major test restructuring before its use in California.

Trying to address allegations of bias in the current SAT is one of the goals, said planners at the College Board and Educational Testing Service.

“Not to want to allay some of those concerns would be insensitive and foolish,” said Cox, the UC and College Board official. “But the development of the new test is to try to make it more responsive to the ability to predict academic success. It’s not going to change the quality of the education the student had in school before.”

In 1989, men averaged a 434 score on the verbal SAT section, compared to 421 for women; in math, men scored 500 points on average, while women scored 454. Blacks averaged 351 in verbal and 386 in math. Mexican-Americans scored 381 in verbal and 430 in math. Asian-Americans averaged 409 in verbal and higher than any other group, 525 in math.

Some advocates for women warily welcome the SAT proposals, explaining that women tend to do better than men on essay writing and readings of longer texts. But the test will still favor males if the content of questions emphasize sports and finance, according to Ellen Vargyas, staff attorney with the National Women’s Law Center in Washington.

Females did slightly better than males on the verbal portion until 1972 when more male-oriented questions began to be used, Vargyas contended.

The number of SAT questions probably will be cut somewhat and the three-hour time limit expanded by a few minutes--but not enough to satisfy critics who say that the deadline atmosphere is unfair to females. Males tend to approach the test as a game with strategies for speed and multiple-choice questions. “Girls are a bit more cautious and tend to work problems as they’ve been taught,” said Phyllis Rosser, a New Jersey-based researcher in the testing field.

Coaching firms such as the Princeton Review teach how to cope with SAT time constraints and tactics to improve guessing. John Katzman, president of that New York-based firm, said he is pleased with the proposed SAT changes but said it is impossible to make the test much less coachable. “There will be fewer tricks but more education, the kind of coaching that we should be doing,” said Katzman, who claims that clients will be shown how to construct a cogent essay to satisfy any grading formula.

A TESTING QUESTION

Following is a sample essay question proposed for the Scholastic Aptitude Test:

Consider carefully the following quotation and the assignment below it. Then plan and write your essay as directed.

“The more things change, the more they stay the same.”

Assignment: To what extent do you agree or disagree with this familiar saying? In formulating your response, consider how you might apply the saying to a field such as history, literature, art, music, architecture, science, psychology, medicine, education or current affairs.