Stop Sharpening Your No. 2 Pencils... The SAT Has Gone Digital
With Dartmouth and Yale recently announcing they will no longer be test-optional and the number of other colleges and universities following suit still unknown, it is more important than ever to pay close attention to the changes being made to the SAT. In case you haven’t heard, the SAT has gone digital; no more paper, no more sharpened No. 2 pencils. The digital SAT will still be administered by a proctor in a school or test center, but all a student now needs is a laptop or tablet and Bluebook™, a custom-built digital exam application that they'll download before test day.
In this new digital format, the SAT has been shortened to 2 hours and 14 minutes, a welcome improvement from the paper and pencil version’s 3-hour timeline. The reading passages are also much shorter, with only one question asked per passage. Another change is that reading and writing are no longer separate sections, with all reading and writing questions intermixed throughout that part of the test. All students will take the test in the same order: Reading and Writing Stage 1 module, Reading and Writing Stage 2 module, Math Stage 1 module, and Math Stage 2 module, with a break before the first Math module. But, the most significant change is that the new digital version incorporates adaptive testing, providing a more personalized and accurate assessment of a student's abilities.
What is adaptive testing?
Adaptive testing is a dynamic approach to assessment where a question’s level of difficulty adjusts based on the test taker's responses. Unlike traditional paper-based tests, where every student receives the same set of questions regardless of their abilities, adaptive testing tailors the test to each student, ensuring a more precise measurement of their knowledge and skills.
Here's how the SAT’s adaptive testing works:
Every student takes the first-stage module. Then, based on performance, the test decides whether to give the easier or harder second-stage module. Typically, if a student gets more than 10 wrong on the first module, they will be given the easier second-stage module, and there will be a cap on how high their score can be, even if they answer every question in the second-stage module correctly. Because of this, there is a unique pressure for students to do well in the first-stage modules if they want a top 25% SAT score. To be clear, the student will not know which second-stage module they’ve been given, but the worry over it might escalate the concerns of an already anxious test taker.
Benefits of this new technology:
The risks of students sharing answers have been all but erased because students testing together will be given different versions of the test. Each digital test will pull from a large pool of questions, all meeting the same content standards, to create unique first and second-stage sections for each student.
Students will no longer have to anxiously anticipate their test scores because, with the instant scoring of these digital tests, students should receive their results in 13 days instead of several anxiety-filled weeks.
Digital technology allows for cool interactive features like videos and interactive diagrams, which help bring some of the test questions to life.
But some concerns remain…
Unfortunately, not all students have equal access to computers, tablets, and reliable Internet service, which could possibly widen the opportunity gap inadvertently.
As anyone who has tried to conduct business using a computer knows all too well, technical issues arise when we least expect them. The same glitches could happen while students are taking the digital SAT or when the tests are being scored.
Despite all the measures being taken to mitigate the risks, taking the SAT digitally inevitably opens the tests up to the possibility of hacking.
As previously mentioned, the anxiety surrounding which second-stage module a student has been given could negatively impact his or her performance.
Regardless of whether you like the feeling of a fistful of sharpened No. 2 pencils and paper filled with tiny, empty bubbles ready to be colored in, the Digital SAT is here, and the only question is whether the ACT is next.