New Digital SAT’s Biggest Change

Today we’re talking about one of the biggest changes coming to the new Digital SAT.

Back in 2022, the College Board — that’s the folks that make the SAT, along with a number other products like the APs, GRE, and CSS Profile — announced that the SAT would become a totally digital test, effective March of 2023 in other countries, and March of 2024 right here in America. Accordingly, the PSAT would adjust in the October beforehand to align with that new Digital SAT.

That means that every other country has already taken the first digital PSAT last October and started taking the totally Digital SAT this past March. Meanwhile, here in America, we’ll have our first Digital PSAT this coming October, followed in March by our first Digital SAT. (Some of my students have even been invited already to take the digital SAT as part of an experiment.)

This new Digital SAT won’t be optional; if you’re taking the SAT it’s going to be digital (unless your student has an approved testing accommodation for a paper-based test).

There are going to be a lot of changes, and I am going to make more videos about it, but maybe the most noticeable change is that, instead of three hours of testing material plus an experimental section, it’s going to be two hours of testing material with experimental questions woven in.

A lot of people are already saying the same thing we hear every time the test changes: that it’s going to be an easier test. Obviously it’s not going to be an easier test.

This will be my third time going through a big test change (to my fourth iteration of the SAT) since I started teaching the SAT so many years ago. And every time, people think it’s going to get easier.

But let’s think about that for a moment. Let’s just follow that thread to its logical conclusion: if it’s going to be easier, then students will get higher scores, then they can get into better colleges, which means those colleges are accepting WAY more students. Obviously that’s not what’s going to happen.

In fact, the College Board has confirmed this will definitely not happen: they’ve assured colleges that the concordance table will not change, so a new 1000 will still mean the same old 1000, 1200 will still mean 1200, and so on, because students are still being compared to everyone else taking the test that day.

It’s a zero sum game. That means for some scores to go up, other scores have to come down. That’s how this test has worked, and that’s how this test will continue to work.

So how are they going to get a meaningful result out of two hours of testing instead of three? This is the big change I want to talk to you about today: it’s called Multistage Adaptive Testing.

Each student will get two reading-and-writing sections and two math sections. In the first section of each, they’ll get a combination of easy, medium, and difficult questions. How they perform on that first section will determine their score bracket — their track. That means if they do well in the first section, they’ll be tracked into a higher score bracket, but if they do poorly in that section, they’ll be tracked into a lower score bracket.

Then in the second section of each subject, students who are tracked higher will get harder questions, while students who are tracked lower will get easier questions. This will finetune where within the bracket their final score officially belongs.

Unfortunately, a lot of students are going to walk out of that test feeling the opposite of how they actually performed. Students who feel good and call it easy may likely have been working on easier questions, and therefore likely got a lower score. Meanwhile, students who feel bad and call it hard may likely have been working on harder questions, and therefore likely got a higher score.

Every time the test changes people have to write brand new curriculum; everybody’s got to do it, even here at Solution Prep. When the SAT changed last time, back in 2016, it was my son’s junior year, and the decision I made was to make sure he was started and finished testing with the old test. I didn’t want him to be a guinea pig for the new test and for new curriculum and strategies. And I’m making the same recommendation to parents and students in the class of 2025 today: get finished on the old test.

It’s May now. The June SAT is in just a few weeks. But after that, there’s going to be an August SAT, followed by October, November, December SATs.

If you’re in the class of 2025, you can get finished with the SAT on the current test and not be a guinea pig for that new curriculum if you get moving this summer. Take your first SAT at the end of August, and you’ll have two or three more chances to test again and maximize your superscore, then send that score to colleges.

If you wait until the October PSAT, then your only available option will be taking the new Digital SAT, and any prep you get will be working with a teacher — maybe me, maybe somebody else — trying out new curriculum for maybe the first time.

I’ll make more videos as the new Digital SAT gets closer, but if you have any questions in the meantime, don’t hesitate to reach out to us at 732-556-8220. We are here to help.