In two months,
hundreds of thousands of the nation's high school juniors will
gather in exam centers around the country to take the new SAT®.
Much has been written and said-both true and false-about how the
SAT will change. As a result, it is understandable that some students
may be confused about what they will see on the new test. Here
is a review of the basic information to assist counselors as they
work with students who will be taking the first administration
of the exam on March 12, 2005.
The new SAT will consist of three sections: writing, critical
reading, and math. Each section will be scored on the familiar
200-800 scale. The test will take 3 hours and 45 minutes, as opposed
to the current 3 hours.
The writing section is new. It will include multiple-choice questions
on grammar and usage and a 25-minute essay to be handwritten by
the student in response to a specific prompt. The essay will count
for 30 percent of the writing score; the multiple-choice questions
will count for the remaining 70 percent. The essay prompts will
be general enough to be comprehensible to all students, but specific
enough to ensure that students can't write their essay ahead of
time.
The critical reading section was formerly called the verbal section.
Analogies will be eliminated, and short reading passages will
be added to the existing longer reading passages. Those passages
also will test analogical reasoning.
In the math section, quantitative comparisons will be eliminated.
However, the content will be expanded to include topics from third-year,
college-preparatory math, often referred to as Algebra II.
