As you might have heard, there are big changes coming to the SAT in 2016. These changes are important and substantive. I wanted to pick out a few issues that every parent and student should consider.

Before I talk about this, however, let me make a quick aside concerning Standardized Testing. I am not a fan even though students at Veritas tend to do really well on the test. It reduces a student's ability to two numbers which are based on the student's ability to fill in the right dots on a sheet. I can think of few more reductionist ways of assessing students. Colleges should not put so much weight on this one flawed test.

The current test is flawed, but the coming changes are going to obscure the historical academic performance until we get more data. Other changes are going to harm the SAT even further. Here are a few key ideas:

1. Know what the score means! We are headed back to 1600.
For many years, the top score was 1600. Recently, the writing section of the test was added. Adding the writing section sounded good, but it turned out to be a joke. As any high school teacher will tell you, grading writing is very difficult. Students quickly learned that the College Board had not allotted adequate staff time to grading and that each test was getting only about 2 minutes of attention. The test was quickly gamed and some were able to earn perfect scores by writing essays that were false or ridiculous. The gig was up. Most colleges have been discounting this part of the test for a while. Now it is going to become optional. Unless, they have changed the quality of the grading (and we won't know how this will affect things initially), this might be an option to avoid. Changing back to 1600 makes it hard to assess student outcomes from one year to the next for a time. (Maybe I am just becoming cynical, but it seems to me that this regular moving of the bar obscures the academic assessment, so that we don't have a clue if students know much or know much of nothing!)

2. The SAT is being conformed to the Common Core.
The Common Core will push the SAT in directions that might move the assessment away from outcomes and more toward understanding of processes. This might sound okay, but the content areas of the Common Core are scary. The direction I have seen on some objectives, in areas like history, seem awful. It is not clear how much these sorts of standards will affect the SAT, but the entire direction is bad. It is bad because the quest for standardization and homogenization in education ends up time after time, ending in questions about minimum standards. My worry is that the Common Core is an attempt at control on steroids! This is national control trying to bend all schools to its priority. If this does not sound enough like Mordor, consider that two of their priorities are to make test prep more difficult on the theory, so that test prep services favor the affluent, and require students to interpret texts from science, history, and social studies. The first priority, trying to build a test for which it is harder to prep (or game), might be a good goal. If you are trying to do it because you want to knock out an advantage of the wealthy, you have to know that more effort and more money is going to go into prepping--not less. The second objective, having more science, history, and social studies texts to interpret, might sound good. It is an attempt to bring the test in conformity to what kids are supposed to be learning in classrooms all over the country. Sound good? It is not! The problem is that what is going on all over the country is not good! Guess whose interpretations of those texts will be favored. What is the right answer for the following questions: Is Naturalistic Evolution true? Were our founding fathers evil men because they held slaves? How much money is too much for a business to make? I would hope that the answer that the new SAT is aiming for will not be as bad as I am imagining, but when it comes to standardized testing, I am cynical.

3. Think through before you Prep for the test in 2016.
This change starts in 2016! Some juniors are moving to take the test in the fall of 2015. Seniors should definitely, definitely, consider this if they are not happy with their scores. Some juniors are prepping hard to make it under the wire with the old test. This might not be the best course of action. Parents should consider a good, solid, test prep for their children--because this change is going to throw everything sideways for a while. It might be wise for juniors to wait for the new test and then prep hard and take the test in the spring of 2016 and retake it in fall of 2016, if needed. Juniors are really in a tough spot on this. (As I mentioned before, the makers of the SAT are trying to make it impossible to prep for, but just watch, the prep material will be out there and will be more needed, and more expensive!)

I was going to include a plea to consider taking the ACT. It is now just as accepted and it might be less affected by the Common Core. However, I just read an article from the ACT that said they are planning on aligning with the Common Core. I need to do more homework. If the ACT avoids conforming to the Common Core, then I think you should strongly consider taking the ACT.

Again, this test and our willingness for so much of our children's college acceptances to be contingent on the outcome of a test like this, is sad. Wise parents and students should look for colleges that consider other factors, but we also need to be wise and prepare our students effectively in light of the compromised system that we have allowed.