Why it matters: It’s taken more than two years but the College Board, the not-for-profit organization behind the SAT standardized test, is finally rolling out its all-digital exam. The new test will take just two hours and 14 minutes compared to three hours for the original. It’ll also have reading passages that are much shorter, and students will be able to use calculators for the entire duration of the math portion.
According to the College Board, the new test is just as rigorous as the paper version but is less intimidating. Jaslee Carayol, director of communications for the College Board, said students with ADHD, dyslexia, and those still learning English, were able to better maintain their focus on the digital exam during piloting.
The not-for-profit believes the digital exam will also reduce the opportunity to cheat as not all exams will be the same. That’s in part because the revised SAT will use a multistage adaptive design where sections are split into two, and the questions you are presented in the second section will depend on how you answered the first set.
On average, the mix of questions in the second half will either be of higher or lower difficulty than those in the first part. Critically, the College Board says students can be sure they end up with an accurate score and won’t be penalized or rewarded for easier or harder questions.
Not everyone believes the changes are for the best. Ariel Sacks, a New York City public school English teacher, told The New York Times that the new format seems to be catering to a generation that is doing a lot of reading on the Internet where they bounce around from one place to the next. “But I don’t think that’s setting a high or even effective expectation for what students should be doing as juniors in high school,” Sacks added.
While a handful of prestigious schools including Brown and Yale recently reinstated standardized tests, many universities have far less stringent admission standards.
The first wave of high school students will take the revised digital SAT on Saturday.
Image credit: Nguyen Dang Hoang Nhu, Glenn Carstens-Peters
