With my coffee this morning, I started reading the preliminary test specification for the new SAT. Here are my immediate thoughts.

Everyone seems to be talking about the new SAT. I'm going to reserve judgment until I see really specific information about the new test. The rather vague descriptions so far sound fine, but details are very, very important on standardized tests.

The New York Times article on the changes has a lot of interesting stuff. But one comment about the relationship between the SAT and socioeconomic status (SES) caught my attention:

The UK has asked ETS, the company that creates the SAT for the College Board, to stop administering two major tests, the TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language) and the TOEIC (Test of English for International Communication) in Great Britain, for the purposes of fulfilling the UK's immigration requirements.

For all my students who have recently taken the SAT (or are planning to do so soon), I prepared a little visualization of what sorts of topics appear frequently on SAT essays. I took all the essay topics made public from March 2005 (the first SAT with a writing section) through October 2013, deleted the boilerplate instructions and attribution lines, and ran the remaining text through Wordle to create a word cloud. Here's the result:

If you complain about the hyperbolic use of literally to mean figuratively, let me ask you this: do you complain (or even notice) similar metaphorical extensions of really or truly?

The question arose when I ran across the following remark by Tim Robbins about Susan Sarandon:

Back in 2007, I wrote a blog post imagining what Present-Day English would look like if you applied the rules of Old English syntax to it. More than 5 years on, it remains one of the more popular posts here.

[UPDATED 2/19/13: added a few more comparisons, and by popular request, appended the list of non-a produce from WordNet.]

On Facebook today, I saw several people referring to a meme "Name a fruit or vegetable that does not contain the letter 'a'." with the comment "not that easy" above it. My immediate thought was that this was silly. Lots of non-a words occurred to me (cherry, lime, plum, beet, celery, turnip, etc., etc.)

Many students (and some test-prep companies) like to trash the SAT for its shoddy, ambiguous questions. For such students, I suppose, complaining is a way of coping with their own stress and imperfect performance. It's easier to cope with missing a question if you can convince yourself that it was unfair. In point of fact, though, truly problematic questions on the SAT are extremely rare. Every once and a while, it does happen.