You may have heard the rumors circulating through the school cafeteria and among the basketball bleachers: “It’s best to take the SAT in May. All the really smart kids are taking their APs in May, so they won’t be able to ruin the curve for everyone else.” Or perhaps you’ve heard this one: “Don’t take the test in October. All the seniors who already sat the SAT are taking it again in October. They’re going to ruin the curve.” Log onto various college prep list serves, and you hear anecdote after anecdote about how the December, January, or March test “had an awful math curve.”
Such rumors could make any conscientious student and her already anxious parents even more frazzled about the whole testing process, but before being taken in by the rumors, let’s see if there is any truth to them.
Is the SAT given in one month really harder or easier than one administered in another month, and does it matter if your fellow test takers that month are a group of geniuses? The answer is easy and reassuring: there is NO statistical advantage in selecting one test date over another. However brilliantly or poorly other students perform on the test that you take has no bearing on your score. Why is this so?
The College Board, maker of the SAT, goes to great lengths to ensure that the final scoring on its tests is consistent – month to month, test to test – via the experimental or “equating” section. This experimental section is included on each test and is not scored. According to the College Board, the equating section either contains old questions whose difficulty is already known, or new questions whose difficulty level the College Board needs to test before using those questions for scoring purposes. “Equating adjusts for slight differences in difficulty between test editions and ensures that a student’s score of, say, 450 on one edition of a test reflects the same ability as a score of 450 on another edition of the test. Equating also ensures that a student’s score does not depend on how well others did (emphasis added) on the same edition of the test.” So there you have it: Through the equating section, the College Board makes sure that neither the difficulty of the test you take, nor the students with whom you take it will negatively impact your score.
It’s important to note that the process of ‘equating’ does not mean that an individual test is not objectively or subjectively harder than another. A test that includes vocabulary words a student knows well will obviously seem easier to him than a test which includes words he’s never encountered. Similarly, a student who has just studied permutations and combinations will find a math question dealing with that topic fairly easy, while another student who has long forgotten that topic will find it hard. But these examples only show that whether a test is easy or hard can largely be subjective.
The College Board acknowledges that one test may be harder than another when measured by objective standards. However, through the equating process, the College Board ensures that the different forms of the test, whether they are easier or harder than others, do not affect a student’s score. In fact, the curve on each test is set before any students even sit for that test; the curve is based on the number of questions of different difficulty levels.
Parents of younger children may be wondering if this will change with the new SAT to be released in 2016. The answer is no; the test will remain standardized. This means the College Board must release samples of the new test in its current experimental sections, and Marks Education tutors are registering for each SAT this year to see if any experimental sections contain the types of questions the SAT has said it will include in its new version. (Our blog has our analysis of the new SAT, and we also present tips for preparing for it.)
Keeping all of these facts in mind should help ease your anxiety about choosing test dates. It does not matter in which month you take the SAT, and it does not matter who else is taking the test with you at the same time. Take the test that works best with your own schedule, and leave the worrying over which test is easier to everyone else.