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AUSTIN, TexasThe organization that runs the SAT said Wednesday it is shaking up the college-entrance exam and offering free online help, throwing a curve to the $1 billion test-preparation industry that has grown up around it.
Out are obscure vocabulary words, mandatory essays, a deduction for incorrect answers and the 2400-point grading scale launched in 2005. In are questions that demand more analysis and familiarity with a narrower range of subjects as well as a return to the longtime 1600-point scale.
Also in the works are a plan to provide free online tutorials to all students and another to arrange for free college applications for economically disadvantaged students.
The nonprofit College Board, which runs the SAT, said the changes would help the test better gauge students' readiness for college and help bridge economic and demographic barriers. The new plan also could encourage more students to take the SAT at a time when it has fallen behind the rival ACT in the number of test-takers.
College Board President David Coleman said the SAT, which nearly 1.7 million students took last year, had become out of touch with what students are learning and was perceived to be a better assessment of "privilege rather than merit." Mr. Coleman, an architect of the Common Core math-and-reading standards rolling out to K-12 schools across the nation with backing from the Obama administration, hopes to close that gap by aligning the new SAT with the skills he believes are more predictive of college success.
The new reading section will ask students to support their answers from evidence in a passage provided. Vocabulary words like prevaricator, sagacious and ignominious will disappear in favor of words like synthesis and empirical whose meanings shift in different contexts.
The math section will draw from fewer topics, but mastery of those on the test is more likely to be predictive of student readiness and career training, Mr. Coleman said. Calculators will be allowed in only some of the math sections, rather than throughout.