By Steven Witkin ‘16

Since 1901, the SAT has been the definitive measure of how well a student can prepare for standardized tests. However, the introduction of competitors such as the ACT has shown the College Board, administrator of the SAT, that there is a sore need to update its landmark test to match what college admission officers are really looking for these days.

Starting in the spring of 2016, students will not only be assessed on the old reading, writing and math, but will face several new sections and question types that will gauge their competence in areas vital to college success, such as sentence formation, reiterating printed information, simple addition and answering questions. In a pamphlet supporting and explaining the coming changes, College Board President David Coleman wrote, “With this new SAT we are embracing the reality that students no longer have to be independent, critical thinkers to compete in the modern college and job market, so we are dropping unrealistic standards and focusing on the essentials. There is no better place to see this than in our new spelling questions.”

The aforementioned spelling questions are the new SAT’s replacement for the old vocabulary questions. The benefit of spelling questions, Coleman explained, is that “colleges don’t care if a student actually knows the exact context of fancy words in impractical documents like scientific studies and political papers. What they are really looking for is a resourceful student who can spell anything Thesaurus.com suggests, a skill vital to writing college essays.”

The College Board provided an example question.

1. What is the correct spelling of Haberdashery?

a) Harvard

b) Nihilistic

c) Habershamadie

d) Haberdashery

e) Hamenstädt

This is clearly a tough one. An ideal student, however, would immediately sound out the word and eliminate choice B because haberdashery does not start with the “n” sound. Choice A is the distractor, but a skilled student would not choose a word which, while being fancy, looks nothing like haberdashery. The final choice of D comes down to close examination of individual letters and syllables, and a student could double-check by matching definitions too.

Another major addition to the test is the geography section. For geography questions, students face various matching questions about countries, their shapes and their capitals, only provided a colorful fold-out world map. “This is one of the most important sections,” Coleman added. “It stresses crucial skills such as global awareness, reading and shape recognition—abilities we believe should be incorporated into education nationwide.”

If a student can answer these challenging questions, sometimes without even knowing what the words mean or countries are, they will prove themselves to be well-rounded, which colleges value much higher than actual intelligence. Coleman said that the main motivation for these changes was “overwhelming feedback from colleges that it does not matter how prepared or gifted a student is. They just want to see that a student has the basic skills needed to be responsive to higher levels of indoctrination.”