New SAT sees dropping scores

By Travis Ball
The Collegian

Many of the freshmen entering Fresno State this fall semester are part of a 2006 high school class that was the first to take the new version of the SAT— and the average score of the class has been the most extreme drop the College Board has seen in 31 years.

With the new version of the SAT test, the College Board bumped the maximum score from 1600 to 2400, mainly because they have added an essay portion to the exam. Analogies are no longer a part of the exam, and the class of 2006 was presented with higher-level math in the test.

Chrissi Clifford, a first-semester freshman at Fresno State and a part of the 2006 class that took the new SAT, said taking out the analogies was a big reason why students did not do as well. “Those are pretty easy,” she said.

The College Board has provided its own explanations for the drop in scores, and some factors it believes did not have an effect. The Board believes part of the score change was due to some students taking the test only once, and not due to fatigue from an exam that takes about three hours and 45 minutes to finish.

Some students who took the new SAT disagree. First-semester Fresno State student Shaina Semiatin said she understands how fatigue can be a factor. “This test required lots of caffeine,” she said. “I had a Monster and some other random energy drink, and that kept me going. But if I didn’t have that I would have probably not done so well.”

However, Semiatin agreed with the idea of taking the exam once being a factor in lowered test scores.

“They say there is a natural increase from your junior year to your senior year,” she said about student’s SAT scores increasing. “There was for me.”

According to Rick Hansen, the composition coordinator for the English Department at Fresno State, the abilities of students coming into English courses has been constant for the last decade. Hansen has been running the department’s first-year writing program for five years, and like the SAT, it is a program that has undergone some change.

The first-year writing program at Fresno State is now a new program called Directed Self-Placement.

Students now have three options to choose from: an accelerated program, a stretch program and a program for multilingual speakers.

As far as the SAT is concerned, Hansen said, “There are problems with objective tests that have always been around. The real question is how do you interpret these results and should you make rules based on the interpretation of this test.”

Hansen believes it may be somewhat unfair to look at the drop in SAT scores for the 2006 class and judge students’ performances on it. Semiatin agrees. She said many people believe the SAT to be some sort of IQ measure, but she thinks that couldn’t be further from the truth. “I don’t think it deserves as much merit as it gets,” Semiatin said about the SAT, “ because there are so many factors when you are taking a test.

There are so many things that can go wrong that can affect your score.”

Both Semiatin and Clifford are Smittcamp Family Honors College students. Like both the SAT and the first-year writing program for Fresno State students, the Smittcamp Family Honors College has made some changes. Because of the new SAT, students now need a score of 1800 to apply to Smittcamp instead of 1200. But the SAT is only one requirement needed to apply the honors program. Students can also apply if they had at least a 3.6 GPA in high school or if they were in the top 10 percent of their high school class.

Comment on this story in the News forum >>