by Helene and Steve Sughrue
In the six weeks leading up to the May SAT, Tabor’s College Counseling office offers SAT prep on Tuesday evenings. My husband Steve, a math teacher, and I (English) have taught the class since 2005, when the College Board last revised the SAT. Now, in 2016, the College board has revised it once again.
How is the new SAT different than before? To start, the College Board has revised cutting the number of sections from three to two and making the essay optional rather than required.While analogies and antonyms were banished in the previous revision, the new version of the SAT has eliminated vocabulary that is esoteric and obscure. Instead, students are urged to consider a word’s meaning in context: The word “outlook,” for example, can have several definitions, but each depends on the way the word is being used. Similarly, on the math section, students are asked to apply skills to disparate problems, to integrate data from graphs, and to read their way through a problem to discover what is actually being asked.
The new SAT, not only the Reading Test, but also the Writing and Language and Math Tests, are reading-focused. In both the Reading Test and the Writing and Language Test, students are tackling long passages--from sources as varied as the Declaration of Independence to an article from Huffington Post. In their wholistic reading of those passages, students are continually forced to check their answers and the evidence that led to them. The essay, no longer an argument the student conjures, is now an analysis of an argument another writer presents. Even the Math Test asks students to be perceptive, careful readers so that they can discern the skills they need to apply to specific problems.
While the new SAT is in many ways more sophisticated and complex than its previous iteration, we also think that it is more forgiving: On the Reading Test, for example, three questions in a row may direct a student back to the same passage, forcing that student to check, double check, and then triple check the answers--just as a student would in a discussion in English class or in a group problem-solving project in math here at Tabor.
While change can be scary, we think that Tabor students will apply the skills they practice everyday in class to the new SAT. The more they read--books, magazines, blogs--the more prepared they will feel for the test. Everything students do at Tabor is good preparation for the SAT.
