Tarrant college-bound students anxious about new PSAT

Fort Worth 16-year-old Gabbye Guess is just days from her one-time shot at a test that could very well become her ticket to a full-ride scholarship to a dozen or more universities.

“It was a little intimidating because everybody kept telling us this is your future; be ready for it,” Guess said.

Guess said she has been strenuously working to score well on the Preliminary SAT/National Merit Scholar Qualifying Test, or PSAT, since the seventh grade.

But when she opens the test booklet at Paschal High School on test day, Oct. 14, she won’t see the same format or even the same test that she spent years preparing for.

The College Board, which administers the exam, and other college-ready programs for the nation’s high schoolers, announced in early 2014 that it was revamping the PSAT. More than 1.5 million students across the nation, including Guess, are expected to take the revamped exam as 11th-graders in the fall.

It’s been a decade since The College Board took a crack at an exam redo. The revamp effort is largely intended to close “opportunity gaps” between students of different socioeconomic backgrounds. Low-income students, advocates say, won’t be at such a huge disadvantage compared with more affluent peers whose parents can afford to enlist them in costly test-prep programs that drill on test strategies to bolster their scores.

“It’s going to make it a lot more of a level playing field because there’s no way to cheat it anymore — you can’t really game it with test prep courses,’’ said Keller High School junior Emersen Bribiesca, 16.

Cyndie Schmeiser, chief of assessment for The College Board, says any student who has paid attention in class can do well on the revamp because it is rich in the core, real-world curriculum that is being taught in the nation’s classrooms.

“The best way for students to start practicing is to take challenging courses in high school,’’ Schmeiser wrote in response to questions from the Star-Telegram.

Some criticism, though, is that the changes have been abrupt.

“It’s a completely different test for a lack of a better way of putting it,’’ said Anthony-James Green, former educator and creator of an on-line, New York-based test prep program. (The cost for lifetime access to Green’s program is $597.)

Green and others say the new exam will do little to erase socioeconomic differences. The College Board has tried to make more test-prep materials available to students with fewer resources, but those who can afford the more intensive, one-on-one, test prep programs will still have an edge, critics say.

“Affluent kids already have the option for not only the free courses but also any review course that their parents will pay for,’’ Fort Worth school district Trustee Tobi Jackson said.

The College Board needed to give educators in more distressed areas more time to adapt to the changes, said Jackson, who represents a swath of Fort Worth’s inner city, including some of the most underprivileged sections, such as the Polytechnic area.

Staff and students at Eastern Hills High School — where most students are socioeconomically disadvantaged — aren’t aware that the test has changed, Jackson said.

“College Board’s aggressive time-line appears to have ignored the very individuals they set out to help — those are the ones that are challenged by low-income or poverty,’’ Jackson said.

Angst at some schools

The change is creating the most angst among parents and students at schools that have had the most success.

“Just taking the test in general causes anxiety, especially for juniors,’’ said Gina Peddy, executive director of curriculum and instruction for the Carroll school district in Southlake. “That’s the National Merit Scholarship program riding on those scores. It’s a huge deal.”

The schools are vying for the greatest number of students who score in the top percentile on the exam and are identified as National Merit Semi-Finalists or Finalists. The title opens the door to more than $32 million in scholarships for those students.

This fall, about 16,000 students across the United States were identified as semi-finalists; more than 90 of those students attend schools that happen to serve some of Tarrant County’s most affluent areas.

Among private and public schools, Carroll Senior High School leads the county in the number of semi-finalists. It has 16.

“I don’t know that we’ve turned anything upside down,’’ said Rebecca Rollins, coordinator of counseling at Carroll Senior High School. “The best preparation for any test like this is excellent teaching and our teachers have always taught at a very high level.”

Assistant Principal Barbara Ozuna said the pressure is on at Paschal High School, another perennial powerhouse for its number of National Merit semi-finalists and finalists. The school has eight this year.

“These kids have been hearing their entire life, ‘This is the test that is your resume for college, yes, this is your performance piece. This is the thing that’s going to get you noticed,’ ” said Barbara Ozuna, assistant principal at Paschal.

“Anxious is a good word,” Ozuna said. “There is a feeling, again among those parents whose kids are scoring fairly high … that there’s an element of unfairness … and guinea-pigness to the fact that the test is changing right as their kids are about to take it.”

Few clues, much pressure

A lot of the panic has occurred because The College Board has remained tight-lipped about what’s on the revamp, educators and students say. So educators and students have been doing a lot of improvisation.

Emersen Bribiesca, the Keller junior, said she began preparing for the new PSAT in the summer. She is hoping her arsenal of Advanced Placement courses — rigorous, college-level classes that are intended to help students prepare for college — are enough to help her succeed.

“This test for me is to get to know how I rank up against other students in the nation and how I’ve done in school,’’ she said.

But the little that she knows about the exam “makes it more tough to prepare. I don’t really know what’s expected,’’ Bribiesca said.

In March 2014, Paschal educators began hunting for clues to the new exam’s content. The first step was to gather information at an Advanced Placement conference in Philadelphia sponsored by The College Board in 2014. Ozuna and her staff got glimpses of the revamp at the conference.

“We got tidbits about it,’’ Ozuna said. Teachers were told it was going be “more real-world applications.”

But “once again,’’ she said, “we didn’t really know what that was going to look like.”

Carroll’s Peddy said her staff faced a similar predicament.

“We haven’t seen a whole lot of test questions,’’ she said.

In February, the Paschal High staff attended a College Board forum in Dallas, where the organization released some nuts-and-bolts information or “specifications” on the test. Her teachers went back to Fort Worth to draw up “question stems” based on magazine articles, books — anything they could find to use as an exercise.

“It was the only way we felt we could get a handle on what’s this going to look like,” Ozuna said.

Keller and Paschal held a summer camp to introduce students to the new format. Dozens of Paschal students have participated in Saturday camps, as well, Ozuna said.

“Especially for high-performing kids, a change in format sometimes throws them off completely, even though they could do it with their eyes half-shut,” Ozuna said. “The fact that it’s different just freaks them out.”

Points for guessing

Some local districts say they are doing everything they can to help students perform well on the new exam.

More than 340 juniors in the Birdville school district herded into classrooms and auditoriums at three high schools to learn test strategies at a one-day boot camp, said Diane Vick, Birdville’s advanced academic specialist and acting AVID coordinator.

“We believe this real quick boot camp will give them a heads-up to prepare them for the test,” Vick said.

Birdville also partnered up with a Plano-based college prep agency KD College Prep to provide financial assistance to almost a dozen youngsters who commit to a summer-long intensive test and college prep program.

Without a subsidy, the cost to participate in the comprehensive program over the course of a student’s high school career ranges from $999 to $2,999, depending on the length of use. A ninth-grader, for example, who signs up for the program, will pay $2,999 to receive test-prep resources over the course of their high school career. (The program can start as early as the seventh-grade.)

Several weeks ago, the Carroll school district also provided about 200 youngsters a test run. The students emerged after 6 p.m. one early September afternoon after completing the practice exam, Rollins said.

“Our intention for doing that is just to give the kids a chance to see what it might look like,’’ Rollins said.

To prepare, most students are using the only practice test that the College Board has released, said Kuan Wei Huang, 16, a junior at Paschal. The practice exam was released in May. Huang was glad to learn that the math section had been expanded.

Paschal classmate Anthony Mata, also 16, is taking a practical approach.

“If you worry about it, nothing good will come of it,’’ Mata said.

This story was originally published September 30, 2015 at 2:43 PM with the headline "Tarrant college-bound students anxious about new PSAT."