By: North Shore College Consulting
Here we go again. Class of 2025 (current high school freshmen) pay attention because these changes will impact you.
This morning, the College Board (the agency that administers the SAT) announced that they will once again be revamping the SAT. The College Board intends to replace the paper and pencil format with a fully digital, adaptive platform. While the nuances of this announcement will be fully released over the next 18 months, this is what we know right now:
Rather than the three-hour paper and pencil test that students have come to know, the new SAT will only be two hours, saving students a full hour (of misery?).
The new SAT will be an adaptive test. This means that not every test taker will answer the same questions. Instead, questions will be adjusted throughout the test based on the test taker’s answers and performance. The College Board feels that adaptive testing will allow scores to be determined more efficiently and effectively.
The long reading passages on the current SAT with its bank of corresponding questions and answers will be eliminated and replaced with much shorter reading passages with only one question per passage.
The current SAT only allows test takers to use a calculator on part of the math questions. The new SAT will all calculators throughout the entire math section.
Students will no longer have to anxiously wait weeks for their scores. Instead, SAT scores will be released to students within days after taking the test.
High schools will be given greater flexibility as to when they can offer the test to their students which will hopefully lead to a transition to school day testing versus the current national testing date model.
Test takers will be allowed to use their own devices, and students who do not have a computer or tablet will be provided one by the testing center.
The new format will debut in the fall of 2023 with the 2023 PSAT administered in the United States and the SAT administered internationally. The College Board plans to release the new SAT domestically in the fall of 2024.
The 1600 scoring scale will remain the same.
The College Board will continue to collaborate with Khan Academy to provide students with comprehensive, free, online test preparation resources. The College Board anticipates that free digital practice tests will be available on the Khan Academy website by the fall of 2022.
An announcement this big obviously leads to many unknowns. Although there will clearly be many more questions and answers in the months to come, the following is a list of some current questions and unknowns:
Will the College Board collaborate with the ACT to adjust the concordance scale allowing admissions offices to accurately compare SAT scores with ACT scores? College admissions offices rely on these concordance tables and the interchangeability of SAT and ACT scores.
Will there be a transition from the paper and pencil format to the digital format throughout the fall of 2024? Supposedly not. It appears that the College Board intends to go cold turkey and completely eliminate the paper and pencil test in the fall of 2024, although experience teaches us that this decision could change.
How many times will students be allowed to retest? Currently, students are limited to testing on the scheduled national testing dates, and, on the school day testing date offered by some high schools. The flexibility that will be offered to high schools to decide when and how many times to administer the test opens the door to many more test date options. Does this mean that students will be allowed to test once a month? Once a week? We don’t yet know the answer to this question.
What do these changes mean for the ACT? Will the uncertainty of the new SAT format initially push students to take the ACT while the College Board works out the kinks and issues of its new test throughout the fall of 2024? Will this news pressure the ACT to accelerate plans to create and release its own digital testing platform?
What do these changes mean for the test-optional movement which has considerably gained in popularity as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic? Will this new test result in more colleges permanently going test-optional? On the other hand, will the new test address and resolve so many of the access and equity issues surrounding the current SAT (and ACT) leading colleges to once again require standardized testing in the admissions process?
On paper, the new digital SAT seems to be a positive change in the standardized testing landscape, but there are still more questions than answers. So, once again, students, parents, high schools, colleges, and educational professionals will have to fasten their seat belts and wait as we venture through this new, bumpy terrain.
