Beginning Spring of 2024, students will take the SAT test online due to changes caused by COVID. COVID changed a lot of things for students, from everything being in person, to everything being virtual. Although schools such as Summit K2 are now again in person, College Board announced that SAT testing will now be online, saying that this was something that they already had in mind to change. However, COVID accelerated the process in which they made it possible.
The test will still consist of being scored on a 1600 scale and it will still be taken at schools and testing centers, with the big change of it being online. That wasn’t the only change, however.
Normally, with the SAT being on paper, the questions you get have already been settled. Everyone gets the same packet and the same questions. However, now that testing will be virtual, College Board has a vast variety of things they can change. Now, the questions you get will be adaptive to you. In theory, the harder the questions, the more questions you are answering right. The easier the questions, the more questions you are answering wrong. The more hard questions you answer correctly, the higher your score will be. This makes it similar to previous tests we’ve taken, such as SBAC.
When asked about his opinion on this, Diego Nieves, the former BigFuture Ambassador at Pittsburg High School, shared, “It’s for sure easier in the beginning, but the fact that it adjusts based on how well you do in previous sections doesn’t really make it a standardized test. The purpose of the SAT was to test students’ knowledge based on a set of standardized questions. Now that it adjusts to each person’s placement, it’s not really an ‘SAT’ anymore.”
SAT testing usually lasts around three hours: sometimes even more depending on how long it takes to get started. However, with the new online format, SAT testing will take only about two hours.
During the math portion of the exam, all students will have access to Desmos graphing calculator. In the past, test-takers were encouraged to bring their own physical calculator during the exam and testing sites were prohibited from providing them. BigFuture believes the new addition will reduce any wealth disparities caused by former calculator rules.
The class of 2025 will be the first to experience all of these changes. When asked about their opinion on this, a K2 junior said, “I think it makes it harder to think properly because when writing on paper, I can more easily see how it plays out. I think it puts more pressure on you.”
Other eleventh graders had a different, more positive perspective, one shared, “There’s nobody yelling at you about the time…It used to get me really nervous…It’s more quiet and lets me focus. I like it because I feel like it’s easier to read it because I can zoom in.”
Although the class of 2026 will not be affected until 2025, one anonymous tenth grader has strong opinions about the digital shift. He expressed discontent, stating, “I’m getting tired of using a laptop, I like writing.”
(Cover photo credit: Tenzin Kunsang)
