Standardized testing is receiving a face-lift — and it’s no surprise considering the growing concern of standardized testing as a credible gauge of students’ knowledge and abilities among high schools and colleges.

The College Board, the association that administers the SAT, announced that it will be reforming much of the test to make it more applicable to what students really learn in high schools classrooms. 

Starting in 2016, the test will return to a 1600-point scale, from a 2400-point scale, due to changes such as making the essay portion optional, broadening the range of disciplines in the reading section and placing emphasis on considering context of words over definition in the vocabulary section. The goal of these changes are to make the exam less difficult and tedious for students who likely are struggling to study for a test that is detached from what they learned in high school. 

In addition to restructuring the content of the exam, a quarter-point will no longer be deducted for each incorrect multiple choice answer. 

Making changes such as these will help to transform the exam into something that is less daunting and obscure, and instead more reasonable and representative. The point of taking these standardized test scores into account for college admissions is to determine whether students’ accumulated skill-sets and knowledge in high school will prepare them for college. 

However, many students are more concerned with how to take the test, such as what many SAT-prep courses aim to do, rather than truly pulling from what they have learned through their high school careers. 

Not to mention that students taking this exam come from diverse backgrounds — some from rural areas, some urban, and some with high socioeconomic statuses and some low — yet they are all taking the same exam. In fact, there is a positive correlation between SAT scores and family income, meaning that students with higher family incomes can afford to utilize more resources in regards to preparing for and taking the test.

So, what is the point of taking these standardized exams if it simply comes down to who is best at learning the SAT and ACT-specific materials? 

Well, making standardized testing into a requirement for a majority of colleges should mean that these tests are truly helping admissions boards determine a student’s success in high school and potential for college. And that doesn’t mean using standardized tests solely because they help to gauge large numbers of students’ abilities at one time.

But considering many colleges, including our own, continue to use standardized testing as an admissions factor, then the options are either to reform or de-emphasize. Either reform the SAT to represent students across all socioeconomic statuses, geographical regions and backgrounds, or de-emphasize it to place greater weight on other factors such as academic rigor and grades.

Aside from changing the format of the test, The College Board is furthering its reform by addressing structural inequalities through partnering with the Khan Academy, which provides free online tutorials in different subjects. The goal is to acknowledge the disparity between high-income and low-income families through offering free test preparation materials and college application fee waivers.

Though necessary to create a standard for college admissions, standardized testing is a faulty system that, through these changes, is slowly developing into a credible form of assessing students’ true academic abilities.