The question of whether—or to what extent—the SAT is "coachable" is a perennial controversy. When the recent overhaul to the SAT was announced, College Board CEO David Coleman made a big deal about how the changes would orient the test so that it more closely measured the skills needed for college success. One intended consequence of those changes was that the test would be less susceptible to coaching. Eliminating sentence-completion questions, for example, was meant to discourage students from memorizing long lists of "SAT" words that they would never need again.

TL;DR: Your name isn't worth any points.

The question comes from the flip remark that, because the minimum score on the SAT is 600 (200 each for the Critical Reading, Mathematics, and Writing components), you get 600 points for just for filling in your name. In point of fact, this claim is untrue on several levels.

First, if you merely fill in your name on an SAT score sheet and submit it with no questions filled in, College Board interprets the lack of answers as a request to cancel your scores, so you will get no results at all.

A certain number of SAT takers each year find their scores "delayed for administrative review." Whenever this happens, the students affected are naturally upset or worried, but if this happens to you and you took the test in the U.S., it's almost always good news, assuming of course you didn't actually cheat. (You didn't, did you?)

Normally, when I see a headline about a list of grammatical errors, I can predict that it will piss me off (and at least half the complaints will really be about spelling rather than grammar). This list, 10 Grammar Mistakes People Love to Correct (That Aren't Actually Wrong) is actually pretty sensible.

When the SAT changes in 2016, there will be no more sentence-completion questions. The College Board didn't announce this change directly. Instead they said that "No longer will students use flashcards to memorize obscure words, only to forget them the minute they put their test pencils down."

This is part three in my analysis of the changes to the SAT. Part 1. Part 2.

Another forthcoming change to the SAT is the number of answer choices per question: there will be four rather than five options for all questions. This is another way in which the new SAT will more closely resemble the ACT, which already uses four-choice questions for all the tests except Mathematics.

This is the second installment of my commentary on the changes to the SAT. Part 1 is here

There are a few changes to the new SAT that I know people will be talking a lot about but which actually matter less than you might think they would to the test taker, although they matter quite a bit to the people making the test. Of these, one has received much press attention since the initial announcement: no more deduction for wrong answers.

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:

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: