The SAT’s long, sad, & predictable slide.

The SAT will now be all digital. It’ll be a shorter (two hours instead of three), simpler and, “perhaps easier test.” (Wall Street Journal, January 25, 2022). Its reading passages will be shorter. Calculators will be allowed for all math tests.

Watching this formerly purpose-driven, standardized test become ever more compromised and irrelevant has been sad, though predictable.

In the 1950’, the SAT did its job magnificently for my family. My brother and I were elementary school immigrants to America. We lived on a chicken farm — below the then poverty line — and went to public school where we quickly learned English. My brother turned out to be a math whizz. Sure enough, when he took the SAT — the standardized college admissions test to get into US colleges and universities — he scored a perfect 800 — the only student in the county to do so! The SAT found this diamond in the rough, even with his more modest verbal scores. I have no doubt that my brother would not have been discovered otherwise. He went to MIT.

My score? It was good, but no diamond in the rough.

My next encounter with the SAT was in the 1990’s when my children took it for college admissions. They too did well. I remember that the hardest part of the SAT for them and their friends was that it was timed. Students were told how to play that timing to their advantage.

After that, I didn’t think much about the SAT until around 2002, when, from my perspective, the SAT’s…