On April 16th the College Board released sample questions from the 2016 ‘New’ SAT which were received with much fanfare by the SAT test-training world.

The questions and new essay format, though curriculum based and seemingly ‘more relevant’, still measure convergent thinking: the ability to assess multiple strands of information to arrive at one best answer. Convergent thinking alone, however, does not measure a student’s creativity or intellectual curiosity. To gain a fuller picture of a student’s creative capacity, measuring divergent thinking, the ability to develop multiple approaches to a problem, needs to be included.