[Yan Wang]

Originally Posted by Ryan Dognaux

Alright, maybe I came off sounding too harsh about the last section... but really, at the moment there is no Writing Skills section on the SATI, and students really aren't required to take the SATII... so, in my opinion, the Verbal and Math sections are much more important than that last section.
Rumor has it though that the SATI may soon include a writing section on it, and that it may be scored out of 2400.

Maybe I'm just saying this because I kinda blew off that last section though...

That's definitely not a rumor... it was announced sometime in January what the changes to the 2004 SAT I would be.

Here's the article I wrote for the September issue of our school's newspaper regarding this matter:

College Board Changes the SAT and PSAT
By Yan Wang ‘05

Beginning the next school year, students taking the SAT I and PSAT standardized tests will be affected by the College Board’s changes to both. Announced earlier this year, a modified version of both the SAT and PSAT (otherwise known as the National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test) will be issued to students taking either test after the 2003-2004 academic school year. For most juniors and seniors, this is of no importance, especially since the PSAT does not count unless taken junior year (except for extra-ordinary reasons), but for the sophomore, freshmen, and future classes, they will be faced with a new format and difficulty level.

The new SAT I will be administered starting March 2005 and features extensive change to all sections. The verbal section has been renamed to “critical reading” and will feature more short reading passages and questions (along with the current long passages), which will replace the tedious analogies. Since analogies became part of the SAT I test, teachers and students have often voiced their opinion that being able to make these analogies was not as beneficial a skill as reading comprehension, since the analogies often tested miniscule relationships between very foreign and difficult vocabulary.

The math section of the SAT I will also be expanded upon. Rather than covering concepts from just geometry and algebra I, the section will also include concepts from algebra II along with data analysis, statistics, and probability. Overall, the difficulty level will increase substantially.

The biggest change, however, to the SAT I, will be the addition of a new writing section. Modeled after the SAT II Writing test and PSAT writing section, the SAT I writing component features an essay and grammar related multiple-choice questions. The multiple choice questions will test the “students' ability to identify sentence errors, improve sentences, and improve paragraphs. The essay section will assess students' ability to write on demand”, says the College Board. The addition of this third section to the SAT I will increase the duration of the test to well past three hours.

The PSAT/NMSQT, which is offered once a year in the fall, will also be modified for the fall 2004 testing. The verbal section’s changes will be the same as those affecting the SAT I test. In the math section, the quantitative comparison problems will be eliminated, more advanced level math problems will be added, and two more student-produced response questions will be added for a total of ten. The PSAT writing section will feature new questions similar to those on the new SAT I test. Previously, the math and verbal sections were 25 minutes each and the writing section was 30 minutes, but for the new test, students will be given only 25 minutes for the writing section, thereby reducing the entire test length to 2 hours 5 minutes.

Opinions are mixed about the changes in the SAT I and PSAT tests. For the upperclassmen, most don’t care and sometimes laugh at the misfortune of the underclassmen in receiving harder testing. Others, like Sarah Birman ’05, wish that “they would get rid of the analogies for our tests.” The additional sections are also getting many mixed responses from underclassmen. “That grammar part sucks because teachers, always assuming we have previously learned it, never teach it to us”, says Nikki Page ’06. “Hopefully, because sophomores are the first class to take it … SAT scores will not be so highly regarded.”