Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Identification, Testing & Assessment SAT no longer offered for children under 13?

I just called the College Board and was told that as of June this year, due to Federal regulation, children under 13 are no longer allowed to write the SAT. Does anyone know why?

I was hoping to register DS11 for the SAT to qualify for CTY/DYS. I was partial to the SAT because it is widely recognized (which will help me advocate for him with the local school district), and that DS is comfortable with the format. Which other tests would be most similar to the SAT in these regards?

Hm. According to their own website, younger students can no longer take the SAT on a weekend administration date. They may still be allowed to take a school day administration, in October, March or April:
https://collegereadiness.collegeboard.org/sat/register/special-circumstances/younger-students
https://collegereadiness.collegeboard.org/sat/taking-the-test/sat-in-school
https://collegereadiness.collegeboa...st-security-fairness#intended-use-policy

I would imagine that you need to contact local high schools to see if this is an option in your area.

The ACT still allows younger students to test. Pretty much everywhere that you would use the SAT to qualify for access, you should be able to use the ACT as well. There are plenty of resources for familiarizing him with the format, which is not all that different from the SAT. They don't have the Khan Academy partnership, but they do have their own online test review materials:
https://www.act.org/content/act/en/...test-preparation/free-act-test-prep.html

So, that will make it difficult to apply for CTY SET?

You might try looking for the ACT, especially if your son is stronger in Math. Good to know about the SAT!

Does anyone know what federal regulation they are talking about?

Thanks aeh -- the wording on the College Board website does appear it might leave room for school day testing through the local high schoool, though I will have to wait till the school staff to be back in office in August to find out if it's possible

I contacted the CTY SET as well. They said they have no immediate plan to change the SAT requirement, and are waiting for updates from the College Board

I am also curious about what federal regulation is causing the College Board to change its rule, and whether the same regulation is going to impact the ACT as well.

If College Board has stated that Federal Regulation causes SAT tests to no longer be administered to students under age 13, then College Board may be the best source for answering which Federal Regulation they are referring to.

That said, a bit of online research may provide clues, such as this undated article:
https://www.fairtest.org/federal-standards-standardized-tests

Click College Admissions, Optional List (latest entry Oct 2020)
Click College Admissions, ACT/SAT (latest current test scores, 2019)

Ok, I sent the College Board a message asking about the federal regulations. We'll see if they get back to me.

Here is the response (the relevant part, anyway) from the College Board:

Starting with the August 2021 SAT, College Board will no longer allow students under 13 to register for weekend SAT administrations. Federal regulations prevent children under 13 from creating an online account, which is required for SAT registration. However, College Board will still support a set of options for those few young students interested in taking an assessment during the school year. We have the following in-school testing options still available to students:

? PSAT 8/9 – Available from September - April
? PSAT 10 – Available from February - April
? PSAT/NMSQT – Three test administrations available in October
? SAT School Day - Administrations available in October, March, and April
? For organizations looking to conduct above-grade testing, we encourage working with local schools and districts to implement the above assessments.

Sounds like they just don't want to bother processing paper registrations anymore. I've heard of people "accidentally" registering their children online with an incorrect birthday and then fixing it down the road once their kid is >13. That seems way easier than getting a school your kid doesn't attend to let your kid take a test there during the school day.

They could also quite easily allow a parent to register their child, but again apparently not something they want to bother with.

CTY using only SAT tests for SET already seems problematic to me for non Mathy kids. Especially non US raised non Kathy kids.

They do seem to want to embrace a multinational cohort, but I can’t imagine they have nearly as many non-US verbal qualifiers at all. It seems like this may be the end of them having any non-US SET kids at all?

JHU accepts the ACT for CTY. Are there any concerns about age restrictions or test format of the ACT for younger gifted applicants?

Based on my recent correspondence with the CTY-SET program, they are only accepting the SAT at the moment (the more general CTY program though, does accept a multitude of other tests)

More so than biasing towards US/mathy kids, the CTY-SET -- or any of these talent search programs in general -- seems to be biased towards families who have the resource to do the reasearch and jump through all the hoops to get their kids tested.

A couple of thoughts:

-The talent search programs tend to be very similar for the rather straightforward reason that most of them were founded by professors from the same academic lineage, generally with roots in Julian Stanley's research group at JHU and his collaborators.

-The history of the searches includes innovators whose contributions were motivated by the frustrations of highly-resourced parents who still could not find good educational solutions for their children (in some cases, early researchers involved their actual own children, deidentified, of course), as well as innovators who wondered why reports of EG/PG learners were so much more rare anecodotally than psychometrics would have predicted, and set out to lower the bar to identifying them in a psychometrically rigorous way.

Either way, they began from university research labs and worked their way out to larger swathes of the population. It seems that many of the resulting programs have retained a higher value for statistical rigor (thus controlling for variables, such as the type of test taken) than for the types of integrated, multi-factorial admissions approaches current among the majority of application-only institutions at every level of education.

There is value in both approaches to selection, especially at an institution such as SET (and others), which continues with ongoing research on the eligible pool. (They are, after all, the --Study-- of Exceptional Talent.) Changing their qualification criteria might, in their view, jeopardize some of their long-term research, as comparisons across pools would become much more challenging, if not impossible. The re-centering and re-designs of the SAT have already thrown some dust in that air.

CTY, in contrast, is an educational entity whose mission is much more about meeting the intellectual and social needs of the students who participate. Consequently, its leadership likely feels more freedom to explore/apply more generous (and accessible) criteria. The current pilot study to use routine school-administered instruments for eligibility purposes suggests that equity and access is something they are attempting to address.

Thanks for providing the historic perspective.

One does wonder if the selection bias undercuts some of the results of the longitudinal studies from these programs somewhat.

That's an interesting question. But I would imagine that the type of selection bias they have now is quite similar to the selection bias they had 40 years ago, so the net effect on the discussion likely falls mainly with regard to the generalizabiliy of the results beyond the study population.

ACT refused registration to my 11 yo. They will no longer process registrations nor will they update their software which could easily accommodate parent registration. I emailed or gifted division to see if they would arrange SAT administrator but it is unlikely to happen. I am terribly frustrated.