How the SAT Lowered Expectations

D oes the SAT still measure college readiness?

Over the past four decades, the College Board has made incremental changes to the SAT reading section: It has eliminated antonyms and verbal analogies, quartered the number of vocabulary questions, and replaced longer reading passages with shorter ones. Few have researched the cumulative effect of these changes.

My institution, Thomas Aquinas College, offers a four-year Great Books program with a heavy reading load. For more than 50 years, we have relied on the SAT, which has been in use for more than 100 years, as a gauge of the knowledge and skills that students need for our rigorous liberal arts program. Is the test still a reliable measure of these skills?

We wanted to find out. So we commissioned the Institute for Education Policy at Johns Hopkins University to examine the changes in the reading portion of the SAT, beginning in the 1980s.

The results of the study highlight five significant differences between the old and the new SAT. Four of these differences suggest a diminution in the test’s ability to evaluate students’ readiness to read difficult books. The current exam has far fewer vocabulary questions, much shorter passages, and almost no argumentative or persuasive readings, and it requires far less background knowledge. Of the five main differences that the study notes, only changes in sentence-level complexity suggest a more demanding test.

Take the shift in vocabulary assessment on the new SAT. In 1980, 60 of 85 questions on the SAT verbal section tested vocabulary. Today it’s ten of 66. The antonyms and analogies that demanded independent word knowledge are now gone, and the few remaining vocabulary questions allow students to infer meaning from context.

A highly developed knowledge of vocabulary directly correlates to a student’s ability to read hard books. As the study states, “Reading, vocabulary, and comprehension are mutually reinforcing. As students read more, both the breadth (number of words known) and depth (quality of word understanding) of their vocabulary increase, which in turn supports stronger reading comprehension.”

The Johns Hopkins study also highlights reading-passage length, which dropped from an average of around 300 words in 1980 to 97 words in 2026. Although the newer passages are denser (longer sentences, harder words), they ask students to read far fewer words and never require them to sustain attention across a 300-word passage with several questions. These changes may suit the decreased attention spans that come with smartphones and social media, but they tell us little about a student’s ability to follow an extended argument.

Finally, the study’s authors spotted a qualitative shift in reading passages, away from literary nonfiction, such as speeches or persuasive essays, and toward purely expository texts, which convey information by simply explaining or describing. SAT test-takers no longer need to understand an argument or distinguish between principles and conclusions.

But a student who is unable to follow an argument is not well prepared to read literary, historical, or scientific works of consequence. Moreover, if reading and writing are reduced to gathering and presenting facts, we prevent our students from engaging with the complexities of the human condition. At a time when machines are becoming the standard of intelligence, we risk reducing the human mind to merely another computing device.

As the study points out, changes in the SAT have the effect of shaping what happens in the classroom, as teachers teach to the test. These modifications reinforce the long-standing trend away from considering difficult reading an essential part of any college education. They are yet another indicator of the larger cultural shift that values speed and efficiency, where machines excel, over reason and emotion, which are the human element in education.

Most of these changes have come in the name of equity. The new SAT purportedly lowers the barrier for students with deficiencies in their primary and secondary education, or who have not taken expensive test-preparation courses. While this goal is laudable, if freshmen arrive at college ill-prepared to read demanding books, their professors might no longer assign such works, which is the lamentable situation we find ourselves in today.

Sadly, the changes in the SAT reading section reflect a broader change in how most colleges regard the purpose of higher education. For centuries, having read the Great Books was the hallmark of an educated person, someone whose mind was well stocked with ideas, able to pick up a book on nearly any subject and form a reasonable judgment about it, whether it was a work of philosophy, science, mathematics, history, or literature.

This is what used to be called a university education, one that was thought a fitting preparation for leading men and women.