Georgia students taking PSAT today glimpse SAT redesign

The redesigned preliminary SAT that debuts today won’t feature the infamous verbal section that made student rack their brains for the definition of words like spurious, recalcitrant, panacea or malediction.

The first new SAT exam will be given in March. In Georgia, 10th graders also took the test today as a practice.

The new SAT comes with fee waivers for eligible students, which eliminates the registration fee for the test itself as well as application fees for up to four colleges. I met a private school parent last night who told me her Buckhead high school was also giving the PSAT to freshmen as a practice.

“It’s not OK to ask students to learn something only because it’s on a test”, College Board Chief of Assessment Cyndie Schmeiser said.

28, millions of high school sophomores and juniors across the country will take the new PSAT/NMSQT (The Preliminary SAT/National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test), a test that focuses on the skills and knowledge evidence shows matter most for college and career readiness.

According to Bob Schaeffer of the National Center for Fair & Open Testing (FairTest), “This false precision masks the fact the PSAT, old or new, is a weak predictor of college success, inferior to classroom grades”.

Although there is little data from the past decade, previous studies suggest that test prep’s claims are inflated: on average, students who prep for SATs see gains of around 30 points, possibly minimizing the potential impact of the Khan partnership. Studying student outcomes at schools where SAT score submission is optional – a rapidly expanding field – researcher William C. Hiss found that the test was more effective at winnowing down an applicant pool, partially by scaring off students without stellar scores, than actually predicting how they’d do on campus.

Research indicates that the lion’s share of National Merit aid goes to males and that few African-Americans or Latinos win awards.