ANSWERING READING-COMPREHENSION ITEMS WITHOUT PASSAGES ON THE SAT

Performance of college undergraduates on the Reading Comprehension task of the SAT was well above chance when the passages were deleted. Moreover, examinees and test items performed similarly with or without the passages: individual performance correlated with verbal SAT score, and the difficulty of items belonging to a passage correlated with a normative measure based on equated delta. The findings demonstrate that the Reading Comprehension task substantially measures factors unrelated to reading comprehension. © 1990, Institution of Mechanical Engineers. All rights reserved.