RU Rdy for college?

Does he feel ready to pass college classes?

The question from SAT Practice Test #10 makes me feel scared and astonished. The SAT is supposed to measure college readiness, not whether you're ready to be promoted to fourth grade.

College Board has made SAT reading passages much shorter on the new version of the test, and asks only one question per passage, but denies that it's dumbed down the SAT.

Enterprising students at Brooklyn's Midwood High School averaged 1250 on the 2025 SAT, 900 on the 1985 test, they write in the Midwood Argus. They asked 17 students to take the English portion of a 1985 exam and of a 2025 practice test. The volunteers averaged 560 on the 2025 exam, 380 on the 1985 version. Older versions required more complex vocabulary, and penalized wrong answers to discourage guessing.

The Classical Learning Test, which uses readings drawn from classic literature and philosophy, is trying to break the SAT/ACT duopoly, writes Jon Marcus on Education Next. "Admissions offices at about 300 colleges and universities have agreed to accept the CLT," which is popular with classical education, private and homeschooled students.

Authors of CLT reading passages range from Homer, Confucius and Dante to Austen, Twain, Orwell, Gandhi and Toni Morrison. "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.

The first questions in a sample test are based on the story of the great flood in the ancient Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh. There's an excerpt from St. Teresa of Avila's The Way of Perfection, about her vow of poverty, he writes.

Or something from Book IX of Plato’s The Republic (“How, without rules, is the tyrannical man formed out of the democratical”), paired with Federalist No. 63, from The Federalist Papers, about the need for a senate — a “temperate and respectable body of citizens, in order to check the misguided career and to suspend the blow meditated by the people against themselves.”

"The grammar and writing section might draw from texts such as Booker T. Washington’s autobiography, Up from Slavery, or Albert Camus’s Nobel Prize lecture," writes Marcus.

You can check out CLT's sample test for third-graders, which seems way more challenging than Holler of the Fireflies. Here's CLT's sample test for eighth-graders.

A practice SAT test includes passages from Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, Jack London’s The Call of the Wild and a poem by Black American author Angelina Weld Grimké, he writes.

Students who take the ACT might read about Hrosvitha, one of Europe’s earliest-known women playwrights, according to a sample of that test, or encounter excerpts from an Ann Beattie short story or a botany book by Michael Pollan.

Some Advanced Placement scores have been inflated by College Board's new scoring system, writes Paul E. Peterson in Education Next. AP scoring has not been "dumbed down," responds Trevor Packer, who runs the AP program for College Board. "What changed is that students’ scores more accurately reflected whether they were meeting college-level expectations." I think that means professors have lowered their expectations.