As future members of the Class of 2010 begin filling out college applications, they might be pleased to know that Yale will give equal weight to the older SAT and the newly revamped SAT, which was administered nationwide for the first time nearly seven months ago.
This year, Yale will accept scores from both the older SAT and the revised SAT, which features a new writing section worth 800 points, interim Dean of Admissions Margit Dahl said. If students submit scores from both versions of the exam, the University will look at both sets of results when making its admissions decisions, Dahl said.
“We just kind of look at them, it’s not like we use one and overlook the other,” Dahl said. “It’s an overall sense of testing strength. You’re looking at both of them to get an overall sense of academic strength along with GPA.”
In the past, Yale has looked at students’ separate scores on the math and verbal section of the SAT instead of using a combined score, Dahl said. As a result, it will be relatively easy for admissions officers to compare scores from the old math and verbal parts of the SAT to new math and critical reading sections, she said. The median verbal and math scores of the Yale freshmen class are both usually around 750, Dahl said, and the median scores for the new math and critical reading sections will likely be similar.
Caren Scoropanos, a spokeswoman for the College Board, the company that administers the SAT, agreed that the scores from the math and verbal sections of the old SAT are correlated with the scores from the math and critical reading sections of the new SAT.
In addition to featuring a new 60-minute writing section similar to the old SAT II writing test, the new SAT will feature more difficult math questions and more critical reading questions — analogies have been removed from the old verbal section. About 1.4 million students nationwide have taken the revised SAT, Scoropanos said.
–Yassmin Sadeghi