My story also predicted that the addition of the writing section would damage the SAT'S reliability. Reliability is a measure of how similar a test's results are from one sitting to the next. The pre-2005 SAT had a standard error of measurement of about 30 points per section. In other words, if you got a 500 on the math section, your "true" score was anywhere between 470 and 530. But the new writing section, which includes not only a multiple-choice grammar segment but also the subjective essay, has a standard error of measurement of 40 points. That means a kid who gets a 760 in writing may actually be a perfect 800—or a clever-but-no-genius 720. In short, the College Board sacrificed some reliability in order to include writing.
Finally, I was right about one other thing: that the graders would reward formulaic, colorless writing over sharp young voices. The average essay score for kids who wrote in the first person was 6.9, compared with 7.2 for those who didn't. (A 1 -to-12 scale is used to grade essays. That score is then combined with the score on the grammar questions and translated into the familiar 200 to 800 points.) As my editors know well, first-person writing can flop. But the College Board is now distributing a guide called "20 Outstanding SAT Essays"—all of them perfect scores—and many are unbearably mechanical and cliched.
Still, there's good news. The central contention of my 2003 story was that the SAT'S shift from an abstract-reasoning test to a test of classroom material like Algebra 11 would hurt kids from failing schools. I was worried that the most vulnerable students would struggle on the new version. Instead, the very poorest children—those from families earning less than $20,000 a year—improved their SAT performance this year. It was a modest improvement (just 3 points) but significant, given the overall slump in scores. And noncitizen residents and refugees saw their scores rise an impressive 13 points. It was middleclass and rich kids who account for the much reported decline.
What explains those wonderfully unpredictable findings? The College Board has no firm answers, but its top researcher, Wayne Camara, suggests a (somewhat self-serving) theory: the new SAT is less coachable. When designing the new test, the board banned analogies and "quantitative comparisons". "1 think those items disadvantaged students who did not have the resources, the motivation, the awareness to figure out how to approach them," says Camara. "By eliminating those, the test becomes much less about strategy." Because it focuses more on what high schools teach and less on tricky reasoning questions, the SAT is now more, not less, egalitarian.
Sometimes it's nice to be wrong.
7. What are some of the "right" predictions the author made about the new SAT a few years ago?
8. Why does the author say that the addition of the writing section would "damage the SAT's reliability" (para.4)?
9. What is the "good news" (para.6) about the SAT according to the passage?
