[WalterBright]

> calculators are allowed

OMG. Calculators are useless on the SAT anyway.

> vocabulary has been removed.

I flipped through a book that coached on SAT vocabulary. I knew all the words. Oh well. I never learned vocabulary as an explicit task. I simply read a lot.

I remember one question on the SAT verbal because it irked me. It asked an analogy question which required knowledge of mixed alcoholic drinks. Since I was far from drinking age, I had no idea.

[hammock]

> OMG. Calculators are useless on the SAT anyway.

No, they removed all the non-calculator “thinking” and “logic” math questions. It’s calculator stuff now.

They really nerfed the crap out of the SAT. It’s so soft

[fn-mote]

I’m going to have to ask for a source for this. How long ago is your most recent experience with the SAT?

Here’s a source that contradicts you (first hit for Desmos SAT). One of the allowed calculators is the Desmos app built in to the testing program.

https://www.strategictestprep.com/post/is-desmos-dead-on-the...

[apparent]

The fact that it's not all multiple choice now makes it somewhat harder. Multiple choice questions make it much faster to solve some questions because you can simply plug in possible answers. They also make it easier to know that you're right, if you solve a problem and the answer you got is one of the choices (though they do sometimes include common mistaken answers to fool students).

[somenameforme]

No idea what the SAT is like now a days (based on the comments in this thread) but 'back in the day' if you knew enough about a problem to understand the math needed to solve it, which is needed to plug in the answer, then it'd generally be faster to just solve than working backwards since the number of steps would typically be less than repeatedly plugging in. And most/all questions also had a 'None of the above' option that was the answer a fair chunk of the time.

Another practical thing is that tests seem to trend substantially higher in difficulty when multiple choice. I was part of the first class at my university that took a calculus program which was multiple choice and we thought it was going to be a cake walk. But suddenly like every single test problem was using obscure trigonometric tricks on top of the basic calculus itself. And of course no partial credit for getting everything 95% right and missing one really disguised trig trick at the end. Grades for the class were significantly lower than prior years, because those tests were just nuts - and I'm a very much a math guy.

[WalterBright]

> though they do sometimes include common mistaken answers to fool students

Ya, I quickly noticed that, and so didn't at all take for granted that a matching result was correct.

[WalterBright]

too bad everything is dumbed down.

[apparent]

> Calculators are useless on the SAT anyway.

Graphing calculators can be used to quickly solve certain problems, like simultaneous equations or quadratics. They can also be used to plug in multiple-choice answers to see which one is correct, without knowing how to solve a problem the normal way (or not taking the time to, at any rate).

The new adaptive digital SAT complicates things a bit, in that some questions are not multiple choice.

[WalterBright]

When I took the SATs, it was still the slide rule daze. Graphing calculators didn't appear until many years later.

[apparent]

Fair enough. I'm just pointing out that calculators are not useless on the SAT. Knowing how to use the provided graphing calculator, or having your own and knowing how to use it, is very important if you want a top score.

[grogenaut]

My new HP Prime calculator (that I'm good at) and the HP you used when dinosauers walked the earth are not the same thing.