John Cloud of TIME looks back on predictions he made about the test in 2003:
The story did make some predictions that turned out to be right. For instance, the new test favors girls more than the old one did. It is a long-standing tenet of testmaking that girls outperform boys on writing exams. For reasons I am not foolish enough to speculate about in print, girls are better than boys at fixing grammar and constructing essays, so the addition of a third SAT section, on writing, was almost certain to shrink the male-female score gap. It did. Girls trounced boys on the new writing section, 502 to 491. Boys still outscored girls overall, thanks largely to boys’ 536 average on the math section, compared with girls’ 502. But boys now lead on the reading section by just 3 points, 505 to 502; the gap was 8 points last year. What changed? The new test has no analogies (“bird is to nest” as “dog is to doghouse”), and boys usually clobbered girls on analogies.
But another finding pleasantly surprised him.
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 II 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 middle-class and rich kids who account for the much reported decline.
What’s not clear is whether the SAT is any more valuable today as a tool for colleges selecting incoming students.
