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.

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dmlittle 16 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

I couldn't find a version of this video on YouTube without commentary. The reading comprehension level in the US is completely unacceptable.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4FdGIRBUds4

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WalterBright 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> calculators are allowed

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.

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hammock 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> OMG. Calculators are useless on the SAT anyway.

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

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apparent 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The fact that it's not all multiple choice now makes it somewhat harder. Multiple choice questions make it much faster to solve some questions because you can simply plug in possible answers. They also make it easier to know that you're right, if you solve a problem and the answer you got is one of the choices (though they do sometimes include common mistaken answers to fool students).

	▲	WalterBright 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> though they do sometimes include common mistaken answers to fool students Ya, I quickly noticed that, and so didn't at all take for granted that a matching result was correct.

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WalterBright 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

too bad everything is dumbed down.

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apparent 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Calculators are useless on the SAT anyway.

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.

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WalterBright 3 hours ago | parent [-]

When I took the SATs, it was still the slide rule daze. Graphing calculators didn't appear until many years later.

	▲	apparent 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Fair enough. I'm just pointing out that calculators are not useless on the SAT. Knowing how to use the provided graphing calculator, or having your own and knowing how to use it, is very important if you want a top score.

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grogenaut 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

My new HP Prime calculator (that I'm good at) and the HP you used when dinosauers walked the earth are not the same thing.