@Jr12317 Gracias
I’d still learn vocab. Passages are made of words, after all.
@marvin100 Of course general vocab is still important. I’m talking about the extremely unusual words that the college board is now abolishing.
There’s a few flaws in your logic.
First of all, a couple B’s freshman year does not eliminate you from Ivy contention.
Secondly, strong performance in the SATs does not make up for poor grades. Selective schools get plenty of applicants who have great grades AND SATs (and ECs and recommendations and essays, etc).
Finally, you will probably be happier in the long run if you do the best you can in high school and then apply to schools that seem best for you instead of obsessing over schools in a sports league. People that graduated from Stanford, MIT, Duke and hundreds of other schools have succeeded in life. Keep your commitment to success and let the chips fall where they may.
How about you just improve your poor grades?
Just start studying now for the ACT.
You are in 9th grade. You’ve been in high school for the blink of an eye. Stop worrying about college.
Put down the SAT prep guides, walk away from the computer, and go throw some basketballs-- or snowballs-- around.
Question is…how will this affect the PSAT ?
Feel fortunate that you’re not graduating in 2016 and therefore are the last class to be stuck with the old SAT 
OK, as a high school teacher who teaches 2 SAT prep courses, here’s what I explained to my Sophomores the other day:
It doesn’t matter whether or how they change the SAT.
You will be taking the same SAT as others in your grade. These are the kids you’ll be competing with for admission to the schools of your choice.
Let’s assume that the new SAT makes scores drop significantly. (No, not just from 2400 to 1600, but let’s assume that even the top scores are significantly below 1600.)
It doesn’t matter.
Schools can’t afford to say “we won’t take anyone with a score below x.” They have seats to fill. If they have room for 1000 incoming freshmen, then they need to fill 1000 seats. They’ll take whatever number of kids they need to get those 1000 seats filled, regardless of how far they need to go in terms of scores.
What matters is your percentile. YOUR scores, regardless of what they are, need to be better than the competition’s scores.
Old test, new test, prep materials, PSAT-- none of it matters. What matters is your percentile score. So you prep as best you can for the test you’ll be taking, and don’t sweat the small stuff. Don’t worry about the test being “flawed” just concern yourself with your test taking skills.
And Barrons and Princeton Review and all the other test prep publishers are well aware of the changes. This is what they DO for a living. There will be test prep materials available in due time.
Come on now. If the entire world were perfect and nothing was flawed, you wouldn’t have kids paying $50,000 a year to attend prestigious universities, while the poor kids on welfare can’t even afford community college.
That said, I just wanted to commend the College Board and its president David Coleman on doing a fine job in implementing a newly redesigned SAT that will finally open wide the doors of opportunity for every kid in America and dampen the relentless efforts of the international cheaters who rely heavily on the use of recycled exams.
“Also, why do most people prefer the SAT over the ACT?”
Because the SAT has been and is still considered the “smart” kid’s exam, while the ACT, despite its long existence, has been considered the “dumb” son of a poor farmer’s exam.
But now the ACT has finally found a way to reach out of the masses of relatively “dumb” kids who aren’t really that dumb, but have been made to feel that way by generations of brainwashing from the College Board headquarters that the SAT is, in fact, an accurate indictator of how smart you really are.
So of course, now the masses are rebelling and opting for the ACT instead of the SAT and the colleges have no other option but to place the ACT on equal footing with its evil counterpart, the SAT, because the masses are the ones who pay the money the colleges need.
So now the College Board has to make a new test that also appeals to the masses, which is why the SAT is going to look like the ACT.
In other words, David has finally hit Goliath with his slingshot, and Goliath is reeling.
A common misconception among many test prep academies and teachers/students in Asia is that the recent SAT cheating scandals in Asia are what have contributed to the rise in popularity of the ACT in Asia. Many also believe that people don’t cheat on the ACT. Nothing could be further from the truth! On the surface, of course, it appears this way and while it is true to an extent, what really happened was that, in tandem, with the sudden surge in popularity of the ACT in America over the past several years, the ACT began to slowly but steadily make its name known in Korea and China and elsewhere in Asia as the new “CHEAP” pathway to the American dream.
The ACT also became known as the “dumb” kid’s exam in Korea and we saw an explosive rise in the number of students who began to attend cheap academies that offered affordable ways to attend state, not prestigious, colleges in America. One such academy had almost 1,000 kids in its summer program last year, while many of the high-priced academies had to shut down. All of a sudden, you didn’t need to pay thousands of dollars to cheat anymore on the SAT or take expensive private tutoring; you just had to take the “dumb” kid’s --ACT–exam and the American dream could be available to any Korean kid, not just the rich spoiled kids who attended pricy international schools, who was perfectly content to attend a cheap and low-ranking state school in America.
Only now are the SAT academies beginning to realize this and scrambling to make their own ACT classes, as its evil counterpart–The SAT–the test of inequality, is quickly brushing every scandal under the rug for fear that the ACT will now be king of Asia as well. Just this month, ACT headquarters dispatched its representatives to Korea in a series of lengthy seminars and press conferences to promote the ACT, while the College Board refuses to even hold any type of press conference to address what has been happening in Asia.
So who ultimately wins this battle between David and Goliath?
If anything, it seems as if David doesn’t even need his slingshot anymore.
OK, we get it. We got it on the last thread.
But the vast majority of US kids don’t know or care whether Asian kids are cheating, or are accused of cheating, or hate the fact that they’re accused of cheating.
They worry about the exam they’ll be taking.
For them, it was never about the “smart kid’s exam” vs. “the dumb kid’s exam.” It has been more a question of geography. Schools in the East tended to prefer the SAT, while schools in the West have preferred the ACT.
In reality, for the average American kid-- and the vast majority of those average kids are probably NOT on this site, particularly at 7:30 on a Saturday morning-- it’s now about testing style.
The ACT is more like a class final exam. The questions reflect the material you’ve been taught. They’re more straightforward. And reading and science have their own sections.
The SAT is geared towards a different style of test taker. It’s more about playing with the questions. It relies more on strategy and on pulling together different ideas in a single problem. Reading is part of the broader “verbal” section (instead of its own section) and there is no section devoted to science.
I think my biggest concern with the ACT is that it’s out of a maximum of 36 points, as opposed to 1600/ 2400 on the SAT. So small gains tend not to show up on the ACT. For that “average” kid, those small gains are important.
is OP’s caps-lock stuck?
@bjkmom
Oh so now, it’s like: “Screw the Asians. They’re just a small minority anyway. Who cares whether they are cheating or threatening the Americans with their nuclear bombs?”
That is exactly the type of elitist and racist attitude to which I am referring that causes me to question why we’re being so viciously targeted as a bunch of cheaters as it is, when, in fact, the majority of kids in Asia just want their fair crack at the American dream!
Anyhow, perhaps you are right, maybe it is a matter of preference or geography, or maybe there is a much more sinister plot brewing in the offices of ETS and the College Board to take out the ACT.
Dramatic much?
And, for what it’s worth, my son was adopted from Korea. Your comments were both incredibly inaccurate and incredibly insulting. I won’t even bother to defend myself on the 'racist" and “elitist” accusations… or the idea that the SATs are tied into “nuclear bombs.”
Nope, my point is that most US kids don’t spend their time obsessing about who is accused of cheating on the SAT. It’s absolutely not on their radar. The kids I teach are unaware that a few years ago, a major SAT cheating scandal erupted in a school 10 minutes away from here. (And, no, they weren’t Asian.) Again, not on their radar.
They worry about THEIR scores and how THEY will do. That’s it. This score effects their future. They know that. They want a high score. It’s not about anyone else. It’s about them. They have too much going on in their own lives to know or care about what’s going on elsewhere with those exams, whether that’s down the block, across the country, or elsewhere in the world. None of that effects their score.
For the vast number of kids in the US, the test they take is dictated by the schools they’re applying to. And, historically, that has been a function of where they live. Most US kids don’t get on a plane to go away to school. (Yes, I realize that some, including my niece, do. But most don’t.) They apply to schools within their basic geographic region. And the test required by those schools is the one they take.
Okay, yes, I do apologize for my sudden accusatory outbursts. I will concede on this point and take it no further. I was merely trying to state my opinion on the differences between the SAT and the ACT, but another long drawn-out discussion of who is cheating or doing this or that is certainly not worth our time or effort, yes?
In my experience, this has never been true. Since at least the late 80s, ACT and SAT have been accepted equally by all major colleges. It’s also inaccurate that ACT is strong in the west–the mid-west and south, perhaps, but not the west. I’d know: I’m from CA, and the SAT dominated in CA in the 60s, 70s, 80s, or 90s.