Hi everyone – I will be launching a six-week, online course called Cutting the Cost of College beginning Feb. 12. Please scroll down to the bottom of this post to learn more and email me at Lynn@TheCollegeSolution.com if you want further notifications! Lynn O’Shaughnessy
The College Board is delaying the roll out of its new SAT test.
The launch of the redesigned test had been scheduled for 2015, but the test maker is delaying it by a year.
The College Board’s press office released a short statement yesterday that said:
“This change in the timing of the redesign will serve our members in higher education by providing two years to plan for the redesigned exam and it will allow students to take the revised PSAT/NMSQT before the revised SAT. Our goal is to deliver an assessment system that is focused, useful and clear.
Member input will continue to be 
integral to this work and we look forward to sharing additional information regarding the revision of our exams in the spring.”
The newly revised PSAT, which juniors traditionally take at their high schools in the fall, will roll out in 2015.
In an email to high school guidance counselors, David Coleman, the College Board’s president, said feedback from such sources as the board of trustees, the SAT committee and the higher-ed community prompted the move.
A Surprising Announcement
The announcement was actually a surprising development since there appeared to be broad support for change. The essay portion of the SAT has been a particular lighting rod of criticism. Colemen, who was intimately involved in the Common Core State Standards Initiative, has expressed his dissatisfaction with this portion of the test.
What’s more, there is competitive reasons for the change since the ACT has overtaken the SAT as the most popular college standardized test. For the first time ever, more students in 2012 took the ACT than the SAT, which has been in existence since 1926.
As I mentioned in an earlier blog post this year (see below), the College Board announced in February that it would be overhauling the SAT. The SAT redesign will be the first since 2005 when the essay was added and the analogies (cake is to icing as a unicycle is to__) were dumped. The College Board has only overhauled the SAT twice in the past 20 years.
Read More:
Standardized Testing and the Common Core
Do You Want to Shrink the Cost of College?
Help is on the way!
Michelle Kretzschmar of Do It Yourself College Rankings and I have been working hard on developing an online class for parents that will explain how to make college more affordable. We have designed this six-week course to help make you an empowered consumer as you navigate your child’s college choices.
This class will also be extremely valuable for high school counselors and independent college consultants, who want to help their families find generous schools.
Our class starts Feb. 12 and we will be sharing more details soon. If you are interested in learning more about the class, please email me and I will put you on the notification list.
We hope to see you in February!
There must be a connection between The Common Core battles and this delay. Throw in the Common App fiasco and you have true fear.
One good reason the ACT might be winning – students don’t have to take SAT Subject tests as a separate test for quite a few universities admission applications.