Is the SAT dumbed down -- or just different?

It's not your father's SAT, concludes a new Johns Hopkins study. “The College Board’s conception of college-ready reading has changed,” say analysts, who compared SAT Reading practice tests from 1980, 1987 and 2026. It's not necessarily easier, they conclude. Just different.

But it sure sounds easier.

“The makers of the SAT seem to believe that the ability to tackle long and complex literary works isn’t an important skill for college students anymore,” said John J. Goyette, vice president of Thomas Aquinas College, which teaches a Great Books curriculum. “Sadly, given the state of modern higher education, they’re probably right.”

The SAT's reading passages are much shorter, less than a third of their former length, the report found. "Literary nonfiction, argumentative or persuasive writing is nearly gone, replaced by expository writing. Analogies and antonyms are long gone, and there are far fewer vocabulary questions requiring independent word knowledge.

Furthermore, College Board has replaced "reading passages that assumed prior knowledge and understanding on the part of the reader with texts that reveal their meanings through contextual clues."

The 2026 test asks students to interpret graphs or charts.

While 2026 readings are shorter, and students must answer only one question per reading passage, the text is at least as complex as in the past, the report finds.

Students have the same amount of time to answer fewer questions, and there are four multiple-choice options instead of five.

The 2026 SAT is tailored for students who lack background knowledge and vocabulary knowledge, the report finds. "In short, the older forms more often asked students to arrive already knowing information, whereas the newer form more often supplies what a passage requires as it unfolds."

College Board says it's geared the test to what students will need to do in college, so it remains a reliable predictor of college success.

The new SAT is much easier, charges Michael Torres, policy director for the rival Classical Learning Test. "The College Board is catering to students’ declining performance and social-media-induced attention-control issues."

The CLT, which uses longer readings drawn from classic literature and philosophy, is trying to break the SAT/ACT duopoly, writes Jon Marcus on Education Next. Roughly 300 colleges and universities have agreed to accept applicants' CLT scores. "Most of the passages are just over 500 words — much longer than those on the SAT, though shorter than some on the ACT," writes Marcus.

Florida lets students who failed end-of-semester exams use a CLT score to fulfill English and math graduation requirements, notes Rose Horowitch in The Atlantic. The good-enough score is set very low -- the math bar will be raised next year -- so it's helped marginal students get a diploma and high schools look better.

From that, she concludes Red States are Dumbing Down College Admissions by using the CLT.

"The verbal-reasoning section was . . . less cognitively complex than the SAT and ACT," according to researchers, she writes. "Some students might struggle with the exam’s classic texts, which can contain arcane references and convoluted sentence structures. But the questions themselves tend to ask for a lower level of inference and interpretation than the SAT and ACT," said Mark Sulzer, an associate professor at the University of Cincinnati and a member.

Researchers tell Horowitch there's not enough evidence to justify replacing the SAT or ACT with the CLT, which was introduced only 10 years ago.