The dumbing down of the SAT | The College Fix

It seems many Americans aren’t in the know about the significant changes in the Scholastic Aptitude Test over the last year.

Even most of those in charge, like our legislators, were “surprised to learn” the SAT (and ACT) even “change at all,” writes Michael Torres at the James G. Martin Center.
So … exactly what’s happened with the test?

• First, the paper and pencil version of it is no more; everything is online in an “adaptive” assessment. This means test takers “are served easier or harder questions in later portions of each section based on their early performance.”
• The College Board, creator of the SAT, notes in its Digital SAT Suite of Assessments that two main goals of its changes were to “make [the test] shorter and to give students more time per question.”
• The “Reading and Writing” section of the test scaled back its 500-750-word reading passages to 25-150 words (“the length of a social-media post”) — with just one question per passage...