Goodbye to bubbling in exam sheets, sharpening number two pencils, and scribbling down math work on the testing packets. College Board is revamping their SAT exam. 

The modified SAT will not affect any American high school student that is currently a sophomore, junior, or senior. The new exam will launch internationally in 2023, and will be introduced in the U.S. in 2024. 

The SAT’s most drastic change is its transition from paper to digital. 

Priscilla Rodriquez, vice president of college readiness assessments at College Board, stated, “We’ve been hearing feedback from students and educators about what it’s like to take the SAT and what it’s like to give students the SAT. And some of the rigidity, stress, and length of the rest, we could only make those kinds of changes going digital.”

Despite the SAT turning digital, the exam will not enable students to take the tests at home. The tests will still be administered in school or at a test center, with a proctor monitoring for any misconduct. 

“The digital SAT will be easier to take, easier to give, and more relevant,” Rodriguez claimed. 

Due to the digital aspect of the test, adaptivity of the test will be incorporated. This means that the test will change the level of question difficulty for subsequent questions based on the student’s ongoing performance.  

Aside from going digital, other elements of the SAT have been altered. 

For one, the SAT has been shortened from three hours of testing time to two hours. The SAT intends to change the timing of the exam by reducing the length of reading passages.

College Board said that the shorter reading passages will “reflect a wider range of topics that represent the works students read in college.”

Originally, the SAT’s math section was divided into two chunks: a non calculator and a calculator segment. However, the modified exam will allow the use of a calculator for the entirety of the math section. 

Students will also receive their exam scores within a certain number of days, rather than a couple of weeks. This is made possible because proctors no longer have to deal with packing, organizing, and shipping the testing materials for scoring and recording. 

Every student who has studied or taken the SAT will agree on one thing: the SAT is stressful. Students feel an enormous amount of pressure to perform well and to get a score that will give them an advantage in getting into the college of their dreams. Despite the emphasis placed on the SAT, some schools are no longer using the SAT or ACT to decide one’s admission into their school (test blind), while other schools are now test optional. Most notably, the UC’s have gone test blind. 

According to College Board, there was a November pilot launch of the digital version in which 80% of participants found that the new exam was less stressful than the current exam. 

“What I hope and want is for students to be able to come in and just focus on demonstrating what they’ve learned and what they can do in the core reading, writing and math areas,” Rodriguez stated. “And [to] have a lot of the stress around the test, the rigidity, the policies, all melt away.”

Graphic courtesy of Vanessa Valentino