Adaptive SAT

The SAT Test still strikes fear in my heart after more than 60 years.

The stakes were high for a high school student then. “Ace” the SAT and you will spend September, 1965 guzzling beer on a leafy college campus. “Bottom out” the SAT and you will spend September, 1965 sweating your ass off at Fort Jackson, SC, next stop Vietnam. Unless, of course, you have a debilitating bone spur on your heel like a future Commander-in-Chief.

You walked in to the SAT armed only with well-sharpened, eraser-bearing #2 pencils. The ever-popular slide rule was “verboten”. The calculator had not been invented yet.

You had three painful hours to complete the test and you needed every minute of it to complete each individually-timed section. The test proctor would fill in “Minutes Remaining” in squeaky chalk on the blackboard. (Yes, we had real black slate blackboards in those primitive times. Yes, the squeak of chalk on those blackboards would still cause me to cringe.)

It all worked out for me, but it sure didn’t for the 500,000 GI’s getting shot at in Vietnam in the late ‘60s.

Kids today have it much easier. This year, the SAT is shortened to two hours and it is digital. With the digital SAT, students will get more time per question. Math questions will be explained more concisely than before, and reading passages will also be shorter. On the down side, office supply stores are stuck with gross upon gross of unsold #2 pencils.

The new test will be “adaptive”. Both the math and reading sections will be divided into two parts. A student’s performance in the first part of each section will determine the difficulty level of the second part that shows up on their screen. The second half of the test will either be harder or easier than the first half, depending on a student’s performance. If a test taker breezes through the first half of the math questions, the second half of that person’s test be more difficult. For a test-taker who struggles during the first half, the second half will be easier. In both scenarios, a person’s scores will be calibrated based on the questions’ difficulty.

The SAT Test Prep industry will, no doubt, figure out a way to “game” the “adaptive” test. ”Barron, you’re getting in to UPenn anyway. They took your stepbrothers and stepsisters, and they are dumb as doorknobs. Just to be safe and “ace” that SAT, don’t even think about the first part of the test. Punch in anything. The second half will be so easy that even your Dad could do it. Your score won’t be great, but you can claim that it was “rigged”.”

By Ed Dufton