On March 5, the College Board announced that there will be a redesigned SAT exam starting in 2016.

According to the College Board, changes to the exam include: a focus on more relevant vocabulary; an optional essay (although school districts and colleges may require its completion); a scoring system that will not deduct points for wrong answers; the inclusion of a “Founding Document” (such as the Declaration of Independence) and text from a modern “Great Global Conversation” (such as Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech) and questions that better reflect the type of work required by colleges and careers.

These changes have garnered mixed responses at the high school.

Junior Melanie Grad-Freilich took the current exam in March; but her sister, freshman Daniela Grad-Freilich, will take the new version.

“On one hand, I’m really jealous, because a lot of the things that are going to be corrected on the SAT are things I really had to focus on and work on,” Melanie Grad-Freilich said. “But on the other hand, I’m a little bit nervous for [Daniela] because the first year that they do anything, there’s always a lot of problems. The first year is always the guinea pig year, and I don’t want her to have to suffer because of that.”

Melanie Grad-Freilich said she was in favor of some of the changes based on her own experiences.

“I think that people study a lot for the essay because it’s a timed thing, and I think they get really nervous about that,” Melanie Grad-Freilich said. “I studied a lot for it. I think making it optional would be great.”

She also said it would be nice to have questions on vocabulary that is easier to relate to through previous use in reading and writing.

“For me, there’s no real way to study for the vocab,” she said. “I studied the roots a little bit, but there are so many roots and so many words, and some of them don’t even match up, that it’s impossible to study every single word in the English language. So I kind of just hoped and prayed for those [vocabulary questions].”

Assistant Headmaster Hal Mason said it is too early to tell what kind of effects the changes will have on the high school.

“Will it change the way people do it?” he asked. “Will it make the SATs less important? Will it make them more accurate? Hopefully, it’ll make it less stressful. There’s been a long problem with people just preparing themselves for the test and doing really well on the test, but not really reflecting the work that you’re doing in school. Hopefully, these changes will make the test more accurate and a better predictor of how people do in college.”

Mason said that altering the vocabulary section would be beneficial.

“I think it’s a good idea they’re getting rid of some of the obscure vocabulary,” Mason said. “Getting rid of the essay is interesting. I don’t know how much colleges actually used it, but I think some colleges use it quite a bit. I think some colleges will still require plenty of writing samples, whether done through the SAT or outside of that.”

Mason said these changes could potentially change the way students prepare for the exam.

“The idea behind the vocabulary change is that they’re going to give you vocabulary that you would encounter in the normal course of being a student,” he said. “So a Brookline High School student who’s a conscientious student and does their work and does their reading should be exposed to all of the words that they’re going to be using, which is a different type of studying than taking a book of the 500 most common SAT words and trying to memorize all these relatively obscure words.”

Freshman Genevieve Bondaryk said she expects to prepare for the new exam in a similar manner as she would for the current one.

“Honestly, I don’t think that the studying will be any less hard,” Bondaryk said. “I think I’ll do just as much studying as anybody else who has taken the test previously or after me, and I think the preparation will be the same.”

Although some of the preparation required by the exam may change, Mason said he thinks the level of difficulty of the exam will stay roughly the same.

“The idea is that you’ve got two million juniors taking this test, and you have to come up with a test that will be able to distinguish between the different levels of two million different people,” Mason said. “So if the test is far too easy, and you have half of the country, or let’s say, even 20 percent of the country getting perfect scores, then the test is useless. Because then the test is not helping distinguish for the colleges that would care about that top 20 percent of kids. So the test necessarily has to be at a level where it’s able to make distinctions among that group of really, really smart people. That’s not easy. It’s not easy to construct a test like that.”

Melanie Grad-Freilich said that regardless of the upcoming changes, she is still skeptical of the credibility of the SAT.

“At its core, the SAT is still a standardized test, and some kids test really well, and some kids don’t test really well,” she said. “And you can make all the small side changes that you want, but the fact is that I don’t think that standardized tests like the SAT will ever really be able to prepare kids for college or measure how prepared kids are for college, because college requires so many other things besides being able to sit down and write an essay in 25 minutes.”

Ashley Lee and Lizzy Filine can be contacted at [email protected].