The SAT is actually a lot easier today than it was when most of us took it.
It is an hour or more shorter in length, the long reading passages have been replaced with short paragraphs, calculators are allowed, and vocabulary has been removed.
It is an hour or more shorter in length, the long reading passages have been replaced with short paragraphs, calculators are allowed, and vocabulary has been removed.
OMG. Calculators are useless on the SAT anyway.
> vocabulary has been removed.
I flipped through a book that coached on SAT vocabulary. I knew all the words. Oh well. I never learned vocabulary as an explicit task. I simply read a lot.
I remember one question on the SAT verbal because it irked me. It asked an analogy question which required knowledge of mixed alcoholic drinks. Since I was far from drinking age, I had no idea.
Graphing calculators can be used to quickly solve certain problems, like simultaneous equations or quadratics. They can also be used to plug in multiple-choice answers to see which one is correct, without knowing how to solve a problem the normal way (or not taking the time to, at any rate).
The new adaptive digital SAT complicates things a bit, in that some questions are not multiple choice.
No, they removed all the non-calculator “thinking” and “logic” math questions. It’s calculator stuff now.
They really nerfed the crap out of the SAT. It’s so soft
Ya, I quickly noticed that, and so didn't at all take for granted that a matching result was correct.
Another practical thing is that tests seem to trend substantially higher in difficulty when multiple choice. I was part of the first class at my university that took a calculus program which was multiple choice and we thought it was going to be a cake walk. But suddenly like every single test problem was using obscure trigonometric tricks on top of the basic calculus itself. And of course no partial credit for getting everything 95% right and missing one really disguised trig trick at the end. Grades for the class were significantly lower than prior years, because those tests were just nuts - and I'm a very much a math guy.
Here’s a source that contradicts you (first hit for Desmos SAT). One of the allowed calculators is the Desmos app built in to the testing program.
https://www.strategictestprep.com/post/is-desmos-dead-on-the...
I need the entire paragraph above just to _explain_ my GRE (decent) score because the test has changed yet again in the interim 20 years or so and I suspect the SAT is similar.