The Search For The Elusive 1600

NOW TEENAGERS HAVE SOMETHING new to fear. If sex, drugs and derivative rock and roll weren't bad enough, consider this: beginning next week they will start taking a new version of the Scholastic Assessment Test. The difference between the new, improved model and the stodgy old one is not huge: some shifts in emphasis and two dozen new-style questions. But any change causes anxiety, and the advent of a new test has sent enrollment at test-preparation centers such as Kaplan Educational Centers (owned by NEWSWEEK'S parent company, The Washington Post Company) and the Princeton Review soaring. For upwards of $400 a course, those who can afford it can attempt to get a head start on collegiate success. (About 7 percent of the 1.2 million seniors who take the test annually take a preparation course.) Frankly, says John Katzman of the Princeton Review, "I think the parents are overreacting more than the kids."

The biggest change in the SAT is the inclusion of 10 math questions for which students will have to write in the answers. (Fifty other math questions will still be multiple choice.) For the first time, students may use calculators. On the verbal section, there are no more "antonym' questions to test the vocabulary. Instead, students will now have to fill in blanks in sentences.

Another major change is a big increase in the reading-comprehension section. Critics argue about what such questions are actually testing. Researchers have known for years that students who don't read the passages can still figure out correct answers. Some rule out the obviously wrong answers and then use personal knowledge about the topic. Others reconstruct the main idea of the passage by reading the questions and the possible answers. Officials at the Educational Testing Service insist that this doesn't mean the SAT is flawed. "Students who can answer questions without the passages are using pretty sophisticated verbal-reasoning skills," says ETS researcher Donald Powers.

The next big change in the college boards may be computerized testing. Already, students who want to go to graduate school have the option of taking an "adaptive" computerized version of the Graduate Record Examination (GRE). No two students take the same exam. Each test taker gets a more difficult question after answering the previous one right, or an easier question after giving a wrong answer. It may be the turn of the century before the SAT is computerized. And then it may take a Richter scale to measure the anxiety among teens.

© 1994