If you're a college-bound teen -- or have one in your household -- you know everyone's buzzing about the redesign of America's best-known college entrance exam, the SAT. Official explanations promise a new format that ties more closely to actual classroom learning in high school, while measuring "the essential ingredients for college and career readiness and success."
So what exactly does that mean?
Intrigued -- but not totally convinced -- by these sunny platitudes, I decided over the Memorial Day weekend to put the bureaucrats' assertions to the test. I logged onto a new website that's been jointly developed by the online-education wizards at Khan Academy and the SAT's creators at the College Board. If I was willing to spend three hours at my laptop, picking between answers A, B, C and D, they would take me through a full-length practice version of the freshly overhauled SAT.
Bring it! Within a few minutes, I was back in the world of polynomials, square roots and hunting for grammar mistakes. This was doubly familiar territory. I'd soldiered through the SATs long ago as a teenager myself. And in 2013 I'd run a one-student cram school for our oldest son, introducing him to various traps, arcane details and sly test-taking strategies that hadn't changed much over the years.
For our family, the SAT has always been the equivalent of a rich, crazy uncle who might be in the mood to share his money. We're talking about an erratic actor that could get us out of a tight spot in a hurry. Multiple generations of us amassed patchy high-school transcripts for all the obvious reasons -- and then saved our college candidacies by crushing a test that was meant to be outwitted.
This time around, there's a new vibe to the SAT. On the reading questions, it doesn't make sense anymore to scan the questions first ... and then go hunting in the text itself for the diddly details needed to get the right answer. Now the SAT asks broader questions (with follow-ups, no less!). This new style of engagement calls for a genuine understanding, right away, of what the passage is all about.
Meanwhile, math's eternal gymnastics involving x and y aren't so endless anymore. The new version offers far more charts that look like the sorts of data a high-school student might encounter in a science or even a history class. Can you read the data? Can you make some comparisons and inferences?
The slogan-masters at the College Board might be right, after all. It looks as if they finally have created a test that tracks, pretty closely, what an attentive high school student would know. Do well in school, and you needn't study ultra-hard for the SAT. Your score will likely reflect your full knowledge, rather than a momentarily pumped-up gauge of your quick wits and testing savvy.
I've saved the best detail for last. It turns out that the reading section on my practice test now includes more than just the traditional erudite passages from British authors such as Virginia Woolf. This time around, I also encountered a passage about freelancers who choose to work in a communal office. That's a familiar topic over here at Forbes.com, as seen in recent posts such as this, this and this.
What do you know!? The practice SAT's text draws heavily on this 2013 piece by Forbes contributor Adriana Lopez -- and cites Forbes by name. If you want to check out the test, and see if your Forbes.com reading habit is strong enough to win you a perfect score on that section, here's the test link: Khan Academy practice SATs. (It's in Section 2.) You'll need to create an email logon first, but that takes only a moment.
And if you're a bit of a helicopter parent, wondering how best to encourage your teenagers to get ready for the SAT, yes, you could encourage them to spend all summer reading everything the Bronte sisters ever wrote, with a dash of Hawthorne and Melville on the side. Or you could let them hang out on forbes.com for the fun of it. You'll have their best interests at heart, either way.
