What the College Board Isn’t Telling You About the Digital SAT

The College Board just released details about its much-hyped digital SAT. It will debut here in the US in the spring of 2024, which means that the Class of 2025 will have a paper-and-pencil SAT in the fall, but a digital SAT in the spring. The College Board is telling students and colleges not to worry because scores will be on the same scale and mean the same thing as before, but what do you really need to know in order to decide which version of the test to take – or whether to take the SAT at all?

College Board Wants You to Like This Test

Once you register for the PSAT, you’ll likely start receiving email from the College Board, telling you how awesome the new digital SAT is. It’s only two hours instead of three! There are no more long reading passages! You’ve got Desmos built in for the whole test! Those changes are all true, and they likely sound pretty good to you, which is why the College Board won’t stop talking about them. In fact, you will likely see quotes from students saying things like this: “It felt a lot less stressful, and was a whole lot quicker than I thought it’d be.“

The SAT might be a better test for you, but you probably shouldn’t take the College Board’s word for it. There are no free lunches, so let’s examine the two most ballyhooed changes through a closer and fairer lens.

A Shorter and Adaptive Test

The number of questions on the test has dropped from 154 to 98, but this means that each question is worth more – even the effect of “careless” errors. In comparison to the ACT, the SAT already had a steeper curve at the top: you can get more questions wrong on the ACT than you can on the SAT and still have a “good” score. That difference will be exaggerated even further on the digital SAT which is not only shorter but also adaptive.

Yes, the SAT is adaptive. There are now two Reading and two Math sections. How well you do on the first of each will determine whether you get easier or more difficult second-section questions. The benefit of an adaptive test is that It can be shorter since you’re seeing more questions that are targeted towards your ability level. But the downside is that, if you don’t get to that harder second section, your score will be severely limited. Additionally, the College Board is now using something called Item Response Theory to craft the SAT. There are tons of nerdy and awesome details there, but one important consequence for you to know is that getting a hard question correct is better for your score than getting an easy one correct. That seems fair. Right? But the other side of the coin is that getting easy questions wrong is worse for your score than getting hard questions wrong. That’s NEVER before been true on the SAT, but it is now. So what about those first questions? Yep, they’re really easy, but now it’s really bad for your score if you miss them.

No More Long-Form Reading

The “reading passages” on the digital SAT are no longer full passages but single paragraphs. To be fair, the “long” passages on the current SAT are only 500-750 words, about half the length of this blog. Even so, they demand more sustained and focused critical reading than most high school students are prepared to give. To compensate for removing the need for “sustained” reading by removing those longer passages, the SAT leans pretty hard into the “focused” aspect of its testing. The level of diction, complexity, and nuance on the SAT – the stuff most students would call “tricks” and “traps” – is as high as it’s ever been, and students will be asked to reason their way through questions just as they do now.  Additionally, the SAT has returned to discreetly testing higher levels of diction in the form of sentence completion and vocabulary questions. Although the College Board is certainly not reviving the era of rarely seen and even more rarely heard ‘SAT words,’ vocabulary will be more important on the digital SAT than it was before.

What’s most important for you to know, however, is how these format changes shift the burden that the SAT places on students. In the past, success on the SAT required students to sustain their concentration for four or so minutes as they would read a passage and then be presented with questions that taxed both their reasoning skills and their short-term memories, as they searched the passages for evidence to help answer questions. (Well, at least, you SHOULD be searching the passage for evidence!) The current iteration of the SAT places less emphasis on long periods of concentration and on recall but, instead, increases the cognitive load of the test.

Cognitive load is a term in educational psychology that’s closely related to working memory. It refers to the amount of mental energy it takes to learn and understand how to do something. Standardized tests often feel very different from what’s required at school because good teachers and schools do everything they can to lower your cognitive load in order to make it easier for you to learn. Trying to solve a complicated math problem you’ve never seen? You’re taking on a high cognitive load. Doing a hard problem after a worked example? It’s a lower cognitive load. Reading dense scientific prose without background? High cognitive load. Reading a well-structured and simplified summary of a scientific concept? Lower cognitive load.

On the longer passages of the older SAT, you have time to get more comfortable with the information you are processing. You’re being asked ten questions about the same passage, so you build helpful and comforting familiarity and context as you go. Not so on the new test. The digital SAT relentlessly bounces you back and forth from topic to topic and question to question, so that you never have time to get comfortable with the information. You might answer one question that compares two subtly expressed opinions on an 18th century author you’ve never heard of before having to click “Next” and find graphs that depict the difference in the length of torpor bouts for Alaskan marmots, whatever the heck those are. (Actual example. You can’t make this stuff up!) And what do you need to do for that question? You need to read a dense paragraph, filled with science you don’t really understand, and figure out what they’re asking. Then you have to hold that in your head as you look at the graphs and try to find the trends that you want. Once you’ve got all that in your head, you can turn to the answer choices, each of which is three lines long and full of detail. It’s just a lot to keep track of at one time. And it all starts over on the next page. The new test is a textbook example of high cognitive load.

Do What’s Best for You

In the final analysis, the digital SAT may be a better test for you, but, if it is, it’s because your brain works in such a way that you’re just better able to handle the stuff on the new test. It won’t be because of the College Board’s marketing efforts. The test format has changed, but the best simple and clear advice about the test has not: Invest a few hours of your life into some practice testing. Take an SAT. Take an ACT. Compare the scores. See where you are and where you’d like to be, then think about what it’ll take to get there and if the effort is worth it. 

If you’ve got any questions about that stuff, give us a call. We’ve been helping kids and families make these decisions for over two decades and over four different versions of the SAT! We can help you plot a path that works best for you. Schedule a consultation now!