For most high school students in their junior or senior years, one three-letter acronym conjures up images of stress and significance: SAT. Whether they are truly effective indicators of academic success or not, it is undeniable that standardized test scores, namely those of the SAT, are integral components of most college applications. However, beginning in the spring of 2024, the SAT’s structure is going to change significantly. The test is getting shorter, the question styles are changing, and (possibly most importantly), the entire test is going digital.
If you took the PSAT at Cherokee on October 11, then you got a taste of the new format. The actual new SAT will be composed of an English language arts and a math section, each section having two modules.
The biggest difference between the old and new test is that the digital SAT is an “adaptive” exam. This means that the questions you are given on the second module are determined by your performance on the first module. The College Board claims that this change makes the test more “personalized,” however, this personalization comes at a cost. If test takers don’t perform well on the first module, they are locked into getting easier questions that prevent them from scoring full points on the second module. Another thing that this new adaptive system changes is the length of the exam. Previously, the exam was composed of a reading section, a writing and language section, and a math section, lasting 65 minutes, 35 minutes, and 80 minutes respectively. However, under the new format, both English language arts modules last 32 minutes, and both math modules last 35 minutes. This means that overall, the old exam was 3 hours and 15 minutes, whereas the digital exam is only 2 hours and 15 minutes.
Furthermore, some of the question styles of the SAT are also changing as the test enters a digital format. Previously, the reading and writing/language sections included a long multi-paragraph passage, followed by multiple choice questions. Now, each of the digital SAT’s English language arts questions presents a brief paragraph, followed by a single question. In other words, the digital SAT phases out all of the long passages. Also, as another added bonus, the digital SAT allows calculator use on the entire math section, not just part of it like the paper SAT permitted.
The changes have garnered positive and negative feedback from both teachers and students after they were announced. According to the College Board, the organization that administers the test, when the test was piloted across the country as a trial for the short, digital format, 80% of students claimed that the new format was less stressful than the paper version. Additionally, the new format has been praised by others. In his New York Times article titled “The SATs Will Be Different Next Year, and That Could Be A Game Changer,” Adam Grant, an author and professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, writes that he believes that the new format “will give them [students] a better chance of putting their best foot forward” because the digital version of the test has more lenient time constraints and is overall shorter than the paper version.
Others have criticized the new digital SAT for potentially worsening reading skills. According to Jill Barshay, a graduate of Columbia University for journalism and contributing editor at The Hechinger Report, “There isn’t yet convincing proof that the digital add-ons improve reading comprehension or even match the reading comprehension that students can achieve with text on paper.” Furthermore, a study by Dr. Virginia Clinton of the University of North Dakota has shown that overall reading comprehension decreased when students were given a digital format as opposed to a paper one.
Whether for the better or for the worse, it is undeniable that this change toward the digital SAT is going to have lasting effects on students. This change to a smaller-scale SAT reflects a growing shift away from standardized tests in education. Over the past few years, colleges have been lowering the importance of standardized test scores in admissions; even top colleges, such as Harvard, are currently test optional for applicants. Some have criticized tests such as the SAT, claiming that they are biased towards the wealthy who can afford test prep courses, or that they oversimplify a student’s profile to a 4-digit number.
In such a dynamic and uncertain time for the SAT, it’s important to be aware that the College Board has released free digital SAT resources to prepare for the exam, which allows anyone to practice and achieve success on the test.
To learn more about the information presented in this article, check out https://newsroom.collegeboard.org/digital-sat-brings-student-friendly-changes-test-experience and https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1467-9817.12269.
