College Board Drops New Specs on Digital SAT
College Board is taking seriously the role of students as primary users, and the Digital SAT represents a massive effort to make the test more user-friendly. If this effort is successful, the number of test-takers annually will increase, rather than decrease (as predicted by test-optional proponents), which may make deciding not to submit test scores harder to justify for many students.
In the past few days, troves of new information have been released by College Board about the future of their flagship exam, the SAT.
This is the first time we’ve gotten a complete picture of the new, digital SAT from the test maker itself. Our team has posted a lot about this in the past, with our latest update coming from a test prep industry meeting, but this represents the first time comprehensive test specifications have been released publicly.
On June 28, College Board released sample questions, an overview of the exam, and a 191-page fine-grained description of the exam, as well as the detailed research that has gone into a landmark improvement.
To save you from reading the collective 211 pages of published material, we’ve distilled the key points below.
Digital SAT Timeline
This fall, College Board will release four practice tests on their proprietary testing platform and Khan Academy will release initial practice exercises, to pair.
By Spring of 2023, the International SAT will be exclusively digital.
By Fall of 2023, the International SAT and the PSAT/NMSQT testing suite (incl. PSAT 10, 8/9, etc.) will be digital.
By Spring of 2024, all versions of the SAT and the PSAT will be digital.*
*College Board has not officially announced plans to return to digital AP testing, though one suspects this change must be imminent, as well.
What’s Staying the Same
The test will still be scored out of 1600, although because of the adaptive nature of the exam, students will not know precisely how many questions they got wrong.
There will still be “paired-passage” questions that require students to compare separate Reading texts.
The Math section will remain largely unchanged in terms of content, although the length of word-problem (i.e., story) questions will be shortened.
National test dates will remain unchanged, but College Board may introduce additional test dates.
Students with accommodations will be able to receive the same accommodations on the digital exam, for the most part. (One notable exception is for blind students, who will take a longer, 3-hour, paper-based exam.)
Students with time-based accommodations will not be able to end sections early and progress to the next section, even if they finish early; they must wait out the entire duration of each section.
Students will be allowed to use a calculator on the entirety of the Math section. A built-in graphing calculator (likely Desmos, familiar to many high schoolers) will be available, but students may also bring their own.
What’s (Officially) Changing
All students will receive the same questions on the first module for each section (Reading & Writing or Math). The second module will vary depending on the student’s performance on the first. There are only two difficulty options for the second module: easier or harder than the first.
On the Reading and Writing section, students will have 32 minutes to complete 27 questions for the first module and the same for the second module. That breaks down to 1 minute, 11 seconds per question (about four seconds less than the paper exam, but the passages will be shorter). All of the questions will be multiple choice.
On the Math section, students will have 35 minutes to complete 22 questions for both the first and the second module. That’s 1 minute, 35 seconds per question, which is about eight seconds longer per question than students currently have on the Calculator section, and 22 seconds longer per question than on the paper No-Calculator section. Approximately 75% of the questions will be multiple-choice and 25% will be student-produced response (grid-in) questions.
Each section of the test (the combined Reading and Writing section and the Math section) will contain two separately timed modules. There will be no break between the modules, only a slight pause. When time runs out on the first, the second will begin immediately.
There will now be questions on poetry on the Reading and Writing section.
The Reading and Writing section will place an increased emphasis on vocabulary.
Students will see a greater range of reading topics that will be “more representative of what they will read in college.”
A single question will be associated with each passage on the Reading and Writing section.
Obviously, there’s far more detail in the documents released than we can reasonably cover in this blog post, but if you would like to do a deeper dive on your own, check out the College Board’s website.
If you have any questions about the Digital SAT or would like help preparing for the current, paper-based exam, feel free to reach out to our team of expert tutors.