{"id":107402,"date":"2015-12-31T18:31:32","date_gmt":"2016-01-01T01:31:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/the-sat-pushes-to-reclaim-supremacy\/"},"modified":"2015-12-31T18:31:32","modified_gmt":"2016-01-01T01:31:32","slug":"the-sat-pushes-to-reclaim-supremacy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/the-sat-pushes-to-reclaim-supremacy\/","title":{"rendered":"The SAT pushes to reclaim supremacy"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

\"The
The new version of the SAT will debut March 5. The revised college entrance exam will eliminate penalties for guessing, make the essay optional and leave out much of the vocabulary common in previous tests.<\/span>Associated Press file photo<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>

The SAT, once the nation\u2019s dominant college admission exam, fell behind the ACT in recent years after its rival locked up huge swaths of the market through contracts to provide testing in public schools and more students realized that top colleges and universities would accept either test.<\/p>\n

Now the SAT\u2019s owner, the College Board, has mounted a comeback in its bid to regain supremacy as a new version of the venerable test is about to be rolled out nationwide in March.<\/p>\n

The competition between the ACT and SAT \u2013 two tests of similar length, nearly four hours long (counting essays), but with significant stylistic differences \u2013 affects millions of college-bound students who slog through the grueling ritual every year.<\/p>\n

The Colorado Department of Education announced last week that high school juniors will be required to take the SAT instead of the ACT starting this spring.<\/p>\n

Illinois is also taking steps toward awarding contracts to the College Board to give the SAT to 11th-graders in public schools at no charge to the students, and Michigan will give the SAT in April for the first time. Previously, the ACT had a virtual lock on testing in all three states through contracts.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is significant,\u201d David Coleman, the College Board\u2019s president, said last week. \u201cThese are states that for a very long time have been working with an alternative.\u201d<\/p>\n

Wider access to markets where the SAT now has a minimal presence would heighten the impact of the revisions to the test that aim to make it more accessible.<\/p>\n

The new version, debuting March 5, will eliminate penalties for guessing, make its essay component optional and jettison much of the fancy vocabulary, known as \u201cSAT words,\u201d that led generations of students to prepare for test day with piles of flash cards. It will also return the SAT\u2019s maximum score, now 2400, to the iconic 1600.<\/p>\n

\u201cOf course we are disappointed in some of these decisions, both because of the loss of longitudinal data on progress toward college and career readiness and the investments schools and districts have made in a proven assessment system and the associated programs, services and research,\u201d Paul Weeks, ACT\u2019s senior vice president for client relations, wrote in an email.<\/p>\n

After the SAT\u2019s last revision, in 2005, which added a required writing assessment, it lost market share. Coleman said it\u2019s possible the College Board could lose some customers for a brief period during the transition to a new version. Some students and parents say they prefer the familiarity of the ACT to the uncertainty of a new SAT.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere could be an initial drop because of those concerns,\u201d Coleman said. But he said he is confident that the new test will overcome \u201cwhatever jitters\u201d students may feel \u2013 \u201cbecause everything we\u2019ve done to change the SAT makes it much better for kids.\u201d<\/p>\n

About 1.9 million students in the class of 2015 took the ACT, compared with 1.7 million who took the SAT. The SAT total includes overseas students.<\/p>\n

Scores on both exams have stagnated in recent years, adding to worries about student performance in high schools, even though graduation rates are improving. SAT scores this year sank to the lowest level in a decade.<\/p>\n

The SAT, launched in 1926, historically has had a greater presence on the West Coast, in the Northeast and in the Washington region. The ACT, launched in 1959, has long been dominant in the center of the country and much of the South. The ACT surpassed the SAT in usage in 2012.<\/p>\n

The ACT bills itself as a measure of achievement in high schools, closely tied to the curriculum. The SAT, originally conceived as an aptitude test, has moved toward a similar position, aiming to measure what students have learned in school.<\/p>\n

In Illinois, the Chicago Tribune reported last week that state officials had decided to drop free ACT testing for high school juniors and instead give 11th-graders the SAT under a three-year contract worth $14.3 million. The ACT protested, and the decision is not final. In Michigan, about 120,000 11th-graders are expected to take the SAT in April when the state offers it in public schools for the first time.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnytime you change from something familiar to something new, it\u2019s going to create anxiety and stress out in the field with educators, students and parents,\u201d said Andrew Middlestead, Michigan\u2019s director of standards and assessment. But he said the transition has been smooth. \u201cSo far we think things have been going fairly well,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Competition with ACT test affects millions<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":107403,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5794,5735],"tags":[21,1727,103,13,83,36],"naviga_topic":[],"class_list":["post-107402","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-education","category-news","tag-cortez","tag-dolores-county-school-district-re-2j","tag-dolores-schools-re-4a","tag-frontpage-lead","tag-mancos","tag-montezuma-cortez-high-school"],"acf":[],"author_name":"dh_admin","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/107402","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=107402"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/107402\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/107403"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=107402"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=107402"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=107402"},{"taxonomy":"naviga_topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/naviga_topic?post=107402"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}