The new, digital SAT
Elton Lin
Coming in 2024 to a school near you
Over the last several years, the SAT has undergone some phenomenal changes. For parents who took the test themselves to get into college, and are now hoping to help their children do the same… unfortunately, it isn’t that easy. This guide will catch you up to where the SAT is in 2022.
What are the big changes?
The College Board (the organization that administers the SAT) has announced a lot of changes upcoming, most of which are set to go into effect in the USA in 2024, and a year earlier internationally, in 2023.
A digital test
The biggest change is that the SAT will be offered in digital format only. So put away those #2 pencils! Here’s the full list of changes upcoming to the new, digital SAT:
The entire test will be digital.
The test will be shortened to 2 hours (from its current 3 hour timeframe).
There will be shorter reading passages with only one question tied to each.
Students will be allowed to use a calculator for the entire math section.
Scores will be delivered in days instead of weeks.
Does this mean students can take the SAT at home?
No. Students cannot take the SAT at home. What will happen is that students will go to a testing center or participating school and take the test on a school-provided laptop. (It’s impossible to guarantee a secure and isolated environment for students taking the test at home, and it’s too easy for them to cheat – using another device to look up the answers!)
The SAT will continue to be held at testing centers or in schools that have agreed with the College Board to host the test.
This article, though written before College Board announced the shift to exclusively digital testing, explains the experience of taking the digital SAT. The digital SAT has been offered in countries outside the USA for a while, and the experience of taking the test digitally is already known to many international students. The main upcoming change to the SAT format is that, in 2024 and beyond, students in the USA will no longer have a paper option.
See this video from College Board director Priscilla Rodriguez for a full explanation of the changes (with subtitles).
Why is this happening?
Why the need to change up the SAT format? It started with the (still ongoing as of writing) coronavirus pandemic. The SAT made a lot of allowances, but it was still not possible for some students to take the test. Sending SAT scores became less about students’ knowledge and more about families’ ability to send their kids to a proctoring site.
Schools realized that keeping the SAT as a requirement unfairly privileged students who had access to the means to travel many miles to a place where they could take the test. Many of them went test-optional in 2020. And then, when the pandemic stretched on to 2021, schools kept it test-optional for the next admissions cycle as well.
Now people are questioning if the SAT is still even relevant these days. Studies have shown that SAT scores say less about an individual student’s college preparedness than about the wealth of their family.
In light of these damning statistics, many schools (most notably all of the UCs, but some others too) have announced that they will no longer consider test scores. They will be completely test-free. In these schools, taking the SAT (or ACT) will not help you and will not be considered, even if you submit a score.
The flip side
There is, of course, another side to this, which this article about the new digital SAT brings up. In this article, the SAT is lauded as an equalizer. A student is quoted as saying the following:
“The SAT allows every student – regardless of where they go to high school – to be seen and to access opportunities that will shape their lives and careers. I am one of those students. I’m a first-generation American, the child of immigrants who came to the U.S. with limited financial resources, and I know how the SAT Suite of Assessments opened doors to colleges, scholarships and educational opportunities that I otherwise never would have known about or had access to. We want to keep those same doors of opportunity open for all students.”
Way back in 2016, people were already arguing about this and the College Board was already determined to make the SAT more relevant. The College Board is a business and is trying to position itself to still be relevant in the admissions landscape, but there’s value in having a standardized test, too – as long as it’s actually measuring what it claims to be measuring.
Taking the new SAT
If a student takes the SAT in 2022, or in the USA in 2023, things will probably still be as they were in 2020. A lot of schools may still be “test-optional,”; students don’t have to send their scores. But studying for and then taking the test will be a great refresher of basic skills that every kid will need to be prepared for college.
So what should my takeaway be from these changes?
Why Is This Change a Big Deal?
This change does seem to show that College Board and the SAT is trying to stay relevant to the admissions process, despite the pattern of more colleges moving towards test-optional and test-free admissions. The standardized testing process does seem to be more ingrained in the higher education admissions process, and it may not exit from the admissions landscape as fast as some have expected after the COVID pandemic disrupted all of admissions tests. In addition, a shorter test may prompt more students to at least attempt the test at least once instead of bypassing it as an admission requirement all together.
Another change is the shift to online. As students have recognized during the COVID pandemic, online schooling feels different compared to in-person schooling, and the SAT’s change to online testing seems to signal that a version of online school will be staying long term. As with the shift to online school, this change may be an advantage to some students while some students might find the inability to annotate on paper or the need to work out the problem on a separate sheet disrupting.
Why This Change Doesn't Mean Too Much:
However, the College Board’s latest changes to the SAT won’t change everything students and their families know about standardized testing’s role in the college application process.
For one, even before the new digital SAT was announced, more and more schools were already moving towards test-optional and test-free admissions—notably, the UCs, the CSUs, and the University of Washington have all signaled that they will not be going back to SAT/ACT requirements for admissions. In other words, the role of standardized testing in college admissions has already been following a downsizing trend. While these changes to the SAT itself may seem drastic, their actual impact on college applications are fundamentally lessened by standardized testing’s overall decreased part in admissions. And this new SAT isn’t likely to convince colleges to backtrack from test-optional and test-free admissions, either—although a shortened SAT is easier for students to practice and take, the new SAT doesn’t actually address the socio-economic factors that led many colleges to de-emphasize standardized testing’s importance in the first place.
Of course, this test-optional and test-free trend in admissions doesn’t erase standardized testing’s weight in admissions completely. Despite this, test scores have always been just one of a wide variety of factors considered for college admissions, and this shift to a digital SAT doesn’t change SAT’s weight in comparison to other indicators that admissions boards consider, such as GPA, extracurriculars, and student essays.
The new digital SAT may be a daunting shift in what students and families are accustomed to in college admissions, and there’s no doubt that this will alter the standardized testing process for students in the future. Ultimately, however, this new SAT is a relatively minor change in the larger scope of the college application process. Students should still study for standardized tests, but also recognize the greater importance of other aspects of the college application.