SAT Informational
Packet
Session 1,Fall 2015
Saturday Class
Burbank High School
with Ms. Vazquez
SAT Information Links
AVERAGE College Test Scores by School:
Enter your SAT and ACT scores to see which schools you can apply to:
Tracking and Receiving Your SAT Scores:
Sending Your SAT Scores to Colleges:
SAT Dates and Deadlines:
New SAT Scoring:
SAT Vocabulary Lists:
*When searching for “Best SAT Prep Classes,” I only found biased advertisements.
If you would like an electronic version of this list, please visit my class website or email me at .
What's a Good SAT Score or ACT Score?
So, you just received your SAT or ACT scores and you're not sure whether you should celebrate or immediately register for the next test date.
Well, it all depends on the colleges you are considering. A 23 on the ACT or a 1800 on the SAT may be above average at one university but below average at another. The higher your score, the more options are open to you.
The Higher, the Better
The national average for the current SAT is 1500. For the ACT, it's between 20 and 21. If you are close to these averages you will likely be accepted into a considerable number of colleges and universities (as long as you have decent grades), but may not be considered at more selective schools. Above average SAT/ACT scores will improve your chances of getting into a more selective school.
Scores below an 1100 on the SAT or a 15 on ACT are considered low at just about any four-year college. You can overcome low scores with good grades or an outstanding application. But even if you're accepted by a four-year college, the school may advise or require you to take some remedial courses as a freshman.
Not sure where you stand? Most colleges publish admission data regarding the previous year's freshman class. Check out the range of scores.
Room for Improvement
Unless you pulled in a perfect 2400 or 36, you can always improve your score. Some students are confident that their numbers are high enough to get them into the college of their choice. But unless you're an honorary member of the admissions committee, you never know.
A good SAT score or ACT score can also help you snag additional scholarship money. Even if you have already been accepted to a college, you may want to consider taking the test again (say, in December or January of senior year) for that reason.
What is the ACT?
The ACT is a national college admissions examination that consists of subject area tests in:
English / Mathematics / Reading / ScienceThe ACT with writing includes the four subject area tests plus a 40-minute writing test.
ACT results are accepted by all four-year colleges and universities in the US.
The ACT includes 215 multiple-choice questions and takes approximately 3hours and 30minutes to complete, including a short break (or just over four hours if you are taking the ACT with writing). Actual testing time is 2hours and 55minutes (plus 40 minutes if you are taking the ACT with writing).
The ACT is administered on six test dates within the US, US territories, Puerto Rico, and Canada. In other locations, the ACT is administered on five test dates.
The basic registration fee includes score reports for up to four college choices, if you list valid codes when you register.
What is the difference between the ACT and SAT?
The ACT is an achievement test, measuring what a student has learned in school. The SAT is more of an aptitude test, testing reasoning and verbal abilities.
The ACT has up to 5 components: English, Mathematics, Reading, Science, and an optional Writing Test. The SAT has only 3 components: Critical Reading, Mathematics, and a required Writing Test.
The College Board introduced a new version of the SAT in 2005, with a mandatory writing test. ACT continues to offer its well-established test, plus an optional writing test. You take the ACT Writing Test only if required or requested by the college(s) you're applying to.
The SAT penalizes you for wrong answers, so guessing is discouraged. The ACT is scored based on the number of correct answers with no penalty for guessing.
The ACT has an Interest Inventory that allows students to evaluate their interests in various career options.
The New SAT
Will You Take the New SAT?
Seniors
You’ll probably take the test before March 2016, which means you’d take the current SAT.
Juniors and Sophomores
You’ll probably take the test in March 2016 or later, which means you’d take the new SAT.
TIME
7 Ways the SAT Is Changing
By Charlotte Alter
June 2, 2015
No penalty for wrong answers is one big change
High school students who take the SAT in 2016 will face a very different test than those who came before them. From an increase in curriculum-based questions to a revamped essay section, here are the seven ways the SAT is changing next year:
1) Free test prep: Thanks to a new partnership with Khan Academy, students will be able to access high-quality online test prep without signing up for programs like Princeton Review or Kaplan, which are often difficult for students from low-income families to afford. The Khan Academy test prep has an exclusive relationship with the College Board, which designs the SAT, meaning the free prep might also be the best prep.
2) No penalty for wrong answers: Students won’t be penalized for wrong answers anymore, which means an end to the days of staring at the bubble sheet and guessing whether it’s worth it to guess.
3) Revamped essay: Instead of penning a personal essay for the writing section, students taking the new SAT will be asked to read a passage and then explain how the author is persuading the audience. The essay question will be consistent and will be widely available before the test, but the students won’t see the passage until they take the test.
4) Evidence-focused reading: Just like the new essay section, the reading section will also be more focused on evidence. Students will be asked a question about the text, and then asked which piece of evidence best supports that answer. That means if you get the first question wrong, it could be difficult to get the second question right.
5) No more obscure vocabulary: Instead of quizzing students on words they’ll never use again like “abrogate” or “plaudit,” the new SAT asks students to define a word based on how it’s used in context. Sample questions show familiar words that can have various meanings—for example, “intense” can mean “concentrated,” “emotional” or “determined,” depending on the context.
6) More graphs and charts: The new test will have an increased emphasis on questions that make students infer information from graphs and charts, especially in the reading section. Students will also be asked to revise sentences in order to make them consistent with information in graphs.
7) More great texts:The new SAT reading section will include excerpts from U.S. founding documents like the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights, as well as other important works by authors including Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. Students will not be expected to be familiar with the documents beforehand (so it’s not like an Advanced Placement History test) but they are included to make sure the SAT is more relevant and more closely aligned to what kids are actually learning in school.
Everything You Need to Know About the New SAT
By Bruce Reed
June 3, 2015
Bruce Reed is the co-founder of Compass Education Group, a test-prep consulting company.
The big one: no, it won't be harder
The first time I met David Coleman, it was raining outside. Hundreds of higher-ed insiders were meeting in a Miami Beach hotel for the 2012 College Board Annual Forum, Coleman’s first as president of the 115 year-old nonprofit behemoth. In three days, the gale outside would spin into Superstorm Sandy. And in three years, Coleman’s mandate from the podium to radically re-imagine the test that had blown off course would eventually result in the Redesigned SAT that was shared with the public Tuesday.
College admission testing is like the weather in that it receives little attention until it muddles one’s plans. While stable patterns and evolutionary changes go mostly ignored, the upcoming SAT overhaul, with the new PSAT in October and new SAT next March, is a significant enough whirlwind to have made national news and generate questions of uncertainty from those most directly confronted.
As a co-founder of a test-prep consulting company, I’m already getting questions: Why is it changing? What’s on it? Will it be harder? What should I do to get ready? What are colleges saying about this?
Answering these questions became a little easier with the College Board’s release of four full-length, field-tested sample Redesigned SATs. The unveiling of sample tests nine months before the first official administration is consistent with the College Board’s pledge to make the new test more straightforward and more transparent. This early supply will advantage watchful students, and additional materials delivered later this summer through Khan Academy, which partnered with College Board to offer free online prep materials, will further benefit the most resourceful future test-takers.
Unpacking these newly minted tests, though, requires appreciation of the context around the changes. A look back reveals how the SAT needle has shifted over time—from a test of aptitude to a test of achievement. Or better yet, to a test of alignment.
The SAT debuted in 1926 when college was not tied to career in ways it is today, and the current college admission industrial complex was nonexistent. The original SAT social experiment was meant to measure students’ capacity to learn rather than what they’d been privileged to learn. Like the military intelligence test from which it descended, it was a straightforward and expedient sorting tool. For the past 90 years, the SAT has lived in a near-constant state of alteration. Yet it remains a cultural fixture, arguably one of our most recognizable and enduring brands.
The new SAT is a brand new test with a reassigned identity. It will attempt to respond to those who lament teaching-to-the-test with a high profile endorsement to test-to-the-teaching—so long as that teaching adheres to prescribed standards.
This is a big deal. In addition to working as a sorting tool, the new SAT will now serve as a signaling instrument, too. Once merely a college admissions differentiator, it must now be a de facto high school capstone exam. It is no longer an exam sold only one-by-one to college applicants, but also by the hundreds of thousands via state contracts to compete with the ACT. For those reasons, it not only needs to work, it also needs to look and feel just right.
The new test attempts to look good by requiring students to use evidence to support answer choices; by challenging students to deepen their focus on math skills; by asking students to reconcile and extrapolate from information conveyed through text and graphs; and by engaging students with multidisciplinary content. How test scores correlate with how students do in college will take several admission cycles to determine.
Test builders contend that what a test is has always mattered less than what a test does. Tuesday’s release of practice tests will draw ample attention to examples of what the new test will contain (like a math problem that asks about a bank account’s compounding interest over 10 years, or a passage and accompanying U.S. map that discusses and depicts the different ways soft drinks are described regionally—pop in the Midwest, soda on the coasts!). But more scrutiny of what the new test will reliably do is required, too. As more is asked of the new SAT, might it do fewer things well?
By now, the College Board should have a decent sense of how, for example, the test will or will not change the ethnic, gender, and socioeconomic profiles of results, but little has been said about that. Hopefully the transparency pledge will soon address these concerns. For a test touted as an “evidence-based” exam, virtually no statistical evidence on its psychometric integrity has been made available yet. In fact, more was provided in this area by this time in 2004, during the last (smaller) overhaul in 2005. Students also can’t yet get scaled scores on the familiar 200-800 scale, though that should be available as early as next month.
How does the SAT compare to other standardized tests? The designers of the new test had Common Core and ACT upbringings. The perceived and actual differences are fading away as the traits of the SAT and ACT converge. There will still be two choices, but there will be more or less one common way to take a test.
A catchy narrative within the academic community is that the new SAT will be harder. That first begs the question: harder than what? The current SAT? The ACT? Most difficulty related claims within the context of standardized testing are dubious because they tend to overlook scaling and concordance. The College Board will eventually provide data so that colleges can fairly compare applicants who submit different tests, and test makers are working to ensure that tests remain reliable and that scores remain comparable. So no, the new SAT won’t be harder.
But it sure may feel harder to some.
For starters, the new test will be more reading-centric and passage-based than ever before. On the new SAT, everyone starts out with an interminable string of lengthy reading passages. After first facing a 65-minute, 52-question Reading test containing 5 long passages (some accompanied by charts), students then advance to a 35-minute, 44-question Writing and Language test containing 4 more passages. To complete these sections, students must consume about 4,500 words of text and answer nearly 100 rather wordy questions in a little over an hour and a half—with one short, scheduled break in the middle.
Test takers will then move on (with no break) to back-to-back Math tests—a 25-minute, 20-question, calculator-verboten section (then a break) followed by a 55-minute, 38-question, calculator-friendly finale. The scope of math topics will narrow considerably and reach higher (heavy on linear and polynomial algebra, extremely light on geometry, and with a smattering of trigonometry and statistics). The mix of multiple-choice and free-response item types seen on the current SAT will remain.
Stop. Pencils down. Take a short break. You’ve reached the end of hour three.
Most students will choose to stay for a fourth-hour encore: the optional essay that many colleges will require. The essay will no longer tease out student opinions on a topic. Instead, it will ask students to first read a roughly 700-word essay and then provide an analysis of the author’s effective use of evidence. This baked-in reading assignment means the length of the essay section will double to 50 minutes.
It’s also important to recognize what the new SAT has removed. A fifth answer choice from each question is gone. The quarter-point deduction for wrong answers is gone. And hard vocabulary, or what Coleman calls “SAT Words”, are gone. Indeed there is a paucity of words like paucity. Vocabulary is still tested, but not the way parents remember (analogies, antonyms) or the way this year’s students see it (sentence completions). Instead, the new test will extract an everyday word—like form, convey, or expert—from a passage and ask, “As used … most nearly means.” There is one more expected absence: the much loathed “experimental” section, which was the one section—you couldn’t tell which—that didn’t count but was included to pre-test future items. Test makers have less intrusive ways of doing that now.
It seems the College Board is on track to deliver a fair test that will respond thoughtfully to past criticism and self-reflection. While the test’s lack of history may unnerve some students in the near term, there is reason to think there are clearing skies ahead.
How to Study Vocabulary for the New 2016 SAT
SAT / ACT Prep Online Guides and Tips
Posted byHalle Edwards | Jun 14, 2015 10:30:00 AM
SAT Writing, SAT Reading