Last school year, the state of Michigan had announced that the ACT will no longer be required for high school students but will be replaced by the Scholastic Assessment Test, more commonly known as the SAT. With that being said, the class of 2017 will be the first to be taking the revised version of the SAT.

“We’re like the guinea pigs of the whole entire thing,” said Mikayla Winbigler, a junior here at FHS.

With this decision announced in such little notice, teachers and students are given a little more than a year to switch gears. Naturally, many were frustrated.

“I was kinda shocked because I was like, ‘My whole entire life had been preparing for the ACT, and then they just throw the SAT on us,” Winbigler said. “It was just a big weight on our shoulders.”

Winbigler, however, is only one of many in her class who was upset with Michigan’s decision.

“I was mad because we only have a few months to actually learn all the new stuff for the SAT,” Sarah Kloski, another junior said, “The teachers don’t know the SAT work yet so we haven’t been able to do a lot of it.”

Along with this year’s juniors, FHS teachers were also caught by surprise.

“Like most educators in Michigan, I was initially very frustrated and disappointed in the State’s decision to switch tests,” English Department Head, Mrs. Woods said. “Teachers have spent years learning how to best prepare students for the ACT, which is an important test that opens and closes doors for their futures. The decision to change tests with so little notice didn’t seem to be in students’ best interest.”

Nevertheless, as soon as educators were informed that the ACT was no longer, FHS teachers began working to learn as much as they could about this new SAT, but it was challenging at first.

“It was difficult because this is an updated SAT that has never been given before,” Mrs. Woods said, “so there wasn’t a whole lot of information available at first. Mrs. Cook and I attended a College Board conference last March to begin learning about the test, and the English department began working on changing our test preparation from ACT to SAT, particularly for the Juniors. I know that the math department has also been making similar adjustments to make sure they’re preparing students, too.”

The new SAT has been reconstructed so that the type of questions will be more similar to the ACT, asking questions that are more straightforward. The main obstacle for juniors will be the essay portion, which what formerly was writing argumentative essays and is now analyzing another writer’s argument.

However, in spite of the sudden change in tests, FHS educators are confident that they are still able to successfully ready their students for the test.

“In addition to all of the work that the English and math department teachers are doing to prepare students in class, teachers throughout our building have been trained so that they can support SAT preparation in other classes, too,” Mrs. Woods said. “Plus, students have a ton of resources available to them to help them prepare for the SAT outside of school. In addition, our Juniors just took the PSAT last week, and we will use the results from that test to help us to further target areas of greatest need for our students before they take the SAT in April.”

Other ways juniors can prepare for the SAT is to simply:

• Take challenging classes.
• Do all your work and ask questions when needed.
• Take practice tests that include questions that are similar to the SAT, such as Khan Academy, which has a free SAT prep program.

“I believe that students who want to do well and are committed to preparing for the SAT can definitely be successful,” Mrs. Woods said.