Answering reading Comprehension Items Without Passages on the SAT-I, the ACT, and the GRE

Performance on the reading comprehension (RC) tasks of the Scholastic Assessment Test-I (SAT-I or the "new" SAT), the Enhanced American College Testing Assessment (ACT), and the Graduate Record Examination (GRE) when passages were missing was examined. For the SAT-I and ACT, scores were well above chance and correlated substantially with verbal score on the earlier version of the SAT, indicating that examinees perform similarly with or without passages. Comparable but weaker results were found for the GRE. The findings raise doubts about the construct validity of the RC task. We argue that performance is influenced by the plausibility of item choices with or without the passages and that this, in turn, is the result of the construction of test items with little knowledge of the underlying reading process.