Sitting for the SAT, or the Scholastic Aptitude Test, perhaps the most stressful time in a high school student’s life, has just gotten more stressful.
The SAT dates back to 1926. Since then, scoring has changed, but access to official past exams has not. Until now.
Students in the past—as well as their eager parents readying themselves for battle—would order brick-heavy books issued by Princeton Review and Kaplan, and lock themselves in their rooms with their vocabulary lists, practice tests, and timers.
That all changed on March 9, 2024, with the first digitally administered SAT.
What is different? According to the College Board, the time is shorter, cut down from a whopping three-hour paper and pencil exam to a two-hour digital test on Bluebook, the College Board portal. The digital SAT has shorter reading passages, with only one question tied to each passage, and a built-in Desmos calculator. Sounds easy.
What else is different? The College Board offers no release of past official digital exams. For reasons that remain unclear, this decision will undermine the daunting task of preparing for this test.
The College Board releases “practice” tests and makes available a database of thousands of questions into which one can forage. Prior to the March testing date, the College Board released four digital practice tests. Not only is this an insufficient number of practice tests for a student who wants to take three times as many tests, but the practice tests were not comparable to the level of difficulty experienced on the real digital SAT.
Test takers going into the March exam thought they were ready. After all, the College Board issued these practice tests, so they must be representative of what students would encounter on the real exam, right?
Wrong. The internet was flooded with screaming parents and stunned test takers regarding the math section for many and all practice SATs released by the College Board.
In a press release from the College Board, Priscilla Rodriguez, Senior Vice President of College Readiness Assessments, said, “Our goal was to provide a testing experience that is more relevant to today’s students and is less stressful for students to take.”
It is definitely not less stressful.
Director of College Counseling Damian Long agrees.
“The loss of the College Board’s Question and Answer service on official tests is far from ideal during this transition to the Digital SAT,” Mr. Long said.
And herein lies the problem. With the paper and pencil SATs, past official exams were everywhere. If a precocious student utilized enough past official tests, like anything else, practice makes the proverbial perfect and most likely in combination with some sort of tutoring, was a good indication of scores to be attained. The Digital SAT, however, releases no tests other than their own made-up tests.
According to Sixth Former Xan Matuch, the lack of past official tests impacted his preparation. “The last few questions on the digital math are slightly more challenging than they were in the physical prep that I did, which really threw me off the first time I took it,” he said.
Fifth Former James MacColl had a similar opinion before taking the August digital SAT for the first time.
“I don’t mind that the new SAT is digital, but I do wish that I could have prepared using actual past administered tests, or at least practice tests that were of the same difficulty,” MacColl said.
Then there’s the adaptive component. The what? There are two modules per section for both reading/writing and math. The better a test taker scores on the first module, the harder the questions become on the second, with more points allotted to correctly answered, harder questions. But what those points are and how questions are rated in difficulty accounting for those points is anyone’s guess.
“Haverford families can look forward to even more from us this year around standardized testing, especially with the ACT also announcing changes to come in the future,”
Mr Long
Anyone except for the College Board.
Mr. Long remains optimistic that this problem will be remedied in the future, “[As] a professional who has witnessed countless adjustments from the College Board over my career, I would emphasize the key language of ‘at this time.’ The College Board is receiving significant feedback from recent spring and summer testing, so it will be interesting to see what updates come next,” Mr. Long said.
Haverford has attempted to make this transition palatable for its students. According to Mr. Long, “[We] leveraged our partnership with Compass Education Group to provide families with expert insights, adaptive diagnostic testing experiences, and valuable resources leading up to this transition to the Digital SAT.”
“Haverford families can look forward to even more from us this year around standardized testing, especially with the ACT also announcing changes to come in the future,” Mr. Long said.
While it is too soon for students who are currently embarking on the SAT journey, one can only hope College Board, longing for the past, releases past digital tests to give students their best possible chances of success.
