SAT Changes: Examining the New Rules in the Style of the Old SAT Essay

Prompt: Is it better to have a short and practical test, or a long, expensive, complicated one?

As a matriculated collegiate student, it’s easy to forget how laborious it was to take the SAT. However, I must adjure to forgotten memories of weekends spent with bombastic vocab words, and hours spent in session with Kaplan tutors and textbooks. Like Napoleon in the war of 1812, we can’t forget our previous battles, even if they ended in victory.

The old SAT was a cataclysmic test for many reasons—it hardly prepared the proletariat for college, required memorization of arcane knowledge, and the test experience itself was down right cloying. A prime example of this is Moses when he led the Buddha from the Garden of Eden. If Moses had prepared by fighting snakes, instead of studying poetry, then maybe the Buddha would have emerged without such a large belly.

Thankfully, the College Board has decided to circumvent the old derogatory SAT, and appropriate a new one starting in the spring of 2016. Less emphasis will be placed on diabolical language, there won’t be any required essay, and the reading and writing sections will be combined for a grand total of only 1600 points instead of 2400. This reminds me of a personal experience last April at my cousin’s 8th birthday party. We were all trying to divide up the cake into 24 even slices, when I realized, it would be so much easier if we only split it into 16!

In conclusion, the College Board organization has made the SAT evaluation much easier for the future Harvard College class of 2021. Their results will more efficiently reflect their future collegiate performance, and they will theoretically spend less resources on test prep. However, let this not be a crutch for the younger posterity. As Florence Nightingale once said, “I attribute my success to this: I never gave or took any excuse.”