With many American universities and colleges reversing the lax admissions policies adopted during the pandemic, more and more students are signing up for college entrance exams — yet the tests that they’re taking look significantly different from those of recent years. 

Namely, students who take the SAT will no longer be given a single reading passage that has more than 25 to 150 words — or the length of a typical social media post. It is a significant cut from the 500- to 750-word reading passages that were previously included in the “Reading and Writing” section of the test. 

That’s one of the many changes made to the exam by the group behind the college entrance tests, the College Board, when it overhauled the SAT last year. At the time, the board’s decision to make the test fully computer-based received much of the public’s attention. Now, scholars are raising the alarm over the organization’s other reforms. 

The board’s primary goals for revamping the SAT were to shorten the exam and to grant students more time per question, the group notes in its 2024 SAT manual. 

The new “Reading and Writing” framework, it argues, will benefit those “who might have struggled to connect with the subject matter of a long passage.” The board also claims that the inclusion of more passages across a variety of topics “dramatically increases the likelihood that students will find subjects of interest to them on the tests, which will keep them more engaged during testing.” 

Despite the changes, the board insists that the “rigor” of the reading assessment remains unchanged. The group adds that the reading passages removed from the exam due to their “extended length” — including those “in the U.S. founding documents/Great Global Conversation subject area” — are not “an essential prerequisite for college.” 

Not everyone is convinced, however. The policy director of an online college entrance exam that serves as an alternative to the SAT and ACT, Michael Torres, outlined his criticisms of the exam last week in an article for the James G. Martin Center For Academic Renewal. 

Mr. Torres argues that “being able to pay attention to and analyze texts of extended length on complex subject matters that one may not find immediately entertaining” is exactly the kind of skill that should be considered “a prerequisite for college” — particularly in light of reports that students are struggling to read books from cover to cover. 

Mr. Torres chided the College Board for “catering to students’ declining performance and social-media-induced attention-control issues” rather than holding students “to a clear and rigorous standard.”  

Mr. Torres also took issue with various reforms to the math section, including the board’s decision to allow students to use calculators for the duration section and its move to cut down the number of questions without shortening the time. That increased the math section’s allotted time per question to 1.6 minutes from the 1.3 minutes that were granted to SAT-takers of the past decade. He also points out that the optional essay section was eliminated completely. 

“These changes result in a measurably different test,” he wrote, noting that the board has already begun to change the ACT, another major college placement exam, in ways that “seem to mirror the new SAT.” 

A former school principal turned teachers coach, Doug Lemov, expressed similar disapproval with the board’s changes. “What an embarrassment for the SAT to radically reduce passage length,” he shared online this week. “The ability to sustain focus on & make meaning from longer text is an indicator of achievement & likely college success. Simplistic text erodes any differentiating factor for those kids who actually do take the trouble to read.” 

The reforms also caught the attention of a social psychologist and leading expert on the adverse impact of smartphones and social media usage on mental health, Jonathan Haidt. While Mr. Haidt acknowledged that the College Board did not cite shrinking attention spans as the reason for the SAT makeover, he reiterated his position that “humanity’s ability to pay sustained attention is declining.” 

Concerns that social media use has eroded younger generations’ attention spans have exploded in recent years, in part due to a bombshell article in the Atlantic that concluded that high-achieving high schoolers were arriving at elite universities without having the patience to read books cover to cover. The article also suggested that college professors were catering to their students’ shortcomings by lowering their reading expectations and assigning fewer books.