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:

In the first part of this series, I suggested that many strategies taught by test-preparation companies cannot legitimately be called gaming the SAT. Which is not to say that there aren't strategies out there that do amount to gaming the test. But many test-prep people, including myself, take the line that actual improvement comes from building fundamental skills and takes real work. (The test-prep guy writing in the Times debate I mentioned last time takes this attitude.)

In December, the New York Times had a "Room for Debate" piece called Why Does the SAT Endure? The viewpoints expressed include those of two psychometricians, a college admissions officer, someone working for a test-prep company, and an education policy wonk. Taken together, the pieces didn't constitute much of a debate, but the introduction to the discussion poses the question of why the SAT is still around if, as its critics say, it can be gamed.

Standardized tests in general, and the SAT in particular, get a lot of bad press. Companies like Princeton Review build their entire marketing strategy on trash talk about how horrible the test is. Organizations like Fair Test campaign for abandoning the use of the SAT (and the ACT) in college admissions, claiming that it is both biased and ineffective.

The Grammarphobia question for June 22 addresses our old friend "none is" vs. "none are."

Q: As an SAT writing instructor, I am intrigued by your Grammar Myths page, which debunks the rule that "none" is always singular. Since the College Board follows this rule, we have thousands of students learning to write sentences like “None of the chickens is hatched.” What do you think about that?