With adolescent anxiety on the rise and attention spans challenged, high school students on Saturday will take a revamped version of the SAT designed in part to reduce stress, according to the College Board, which administers the test.
The exam will be shorter — two hours and 14 minutes instead of three hours — and students will have more time for each question. The reading passages will be much shorter, and test takers will now be able to use an online graphing calculator for the entire math portion of the exam.
And after 98 years of students scratching answers on paper, the SAT will now go completely digital for the remote learning generation.
The College Board said the pilot of the exam showed it was just as rigorous as the paper test but less intimidating for students. And those with ADHD and dyslexia, as well as those learning English, reported being “better able to maintain focus” on the digital test, compared to the previous format, said Jaslee Carayol, director of communications for the College Board.
Offering the test digitally also reduces the chance of cheating, the College Board said, because few students will receive the exact same exam. In both reading and math, test takers who perform well early in the exam will gradually getting more difficult questions(The College Board says the scores are accurate regardless of the difficulty of the questions.)
However, there are critics. The move to shorter reading passages is not universally celebrated by English teachers, many of whom believe that despite the constant distractions of technology, students need to develop greater reading skills.
The latest revision to the exam comes at a tense time for the standardized testing industry, as most colleges have dropped testing requirements.
According to data from Common AppThe number of college applicants who submitted SAT or ACT scores plummeted from 76 percent in the 2019-2020 admissions cycle to 45 percent this year.
Although Yale, Dartmouth and Brown recently caused a stir by reinstating standardized testing requirements, claiming scores are the best predictor of academic success, most colleges, which are far less selective, are unlikely to follow suit. will follow, said Mary L. Churchill, associate dean of the Boston University Wheelock College of Education and Human Development.
The average acceptance rate among four-year institutions is 73 percent, and most colleges don’t face the challenge of having to make fine-grained distinctions between huge groups of highly educated students. With some smaller colleges struggling with underenrollment and at risk of closure, many admissions directors see test-optional policies as a way to encourage more applications, Dr. Churchill said.
Amid these changes, the College Board has successfully promoted the SAT to state policymakers as an integral part of the high school experience. In addition, 16 states now require or encourage students to take the test during the school day, regardless of their plans for life after high school.
A total of 1.9 million students took the SAT in high school classes in 2023, with two-thirds taking the exam during the school day, often for free. There were 2.2 million test takers in the class of 2019.
Students take the exam via an app called Bluebook. In a way it tries to recreate the experience of working with paper. There are tools to highlight and annotate and cross out multiple-choice answers that students think are wrong.
Test takers no longer have to flip back and forth between long reading passages and pages of accompanying questions. Instead, they will cover a series of much shorter passages – some only one paragraph – each related to a single question.
Yoon S. Choi, executive director of CollegeSpring, a nonprofit that provides college preparatory courses to students from low-income families, said the new format is a boon for many, especially students of English as a second language.
But others – including some teachers who work with the same group of students – were skeptical about the Executive Board’s review.
“It seems to me that maybe they’re trying to appeal to this generation that reads a lot on the Internet and jumps from one place to another,” said Ariel Sacks, an English teacher at a New York City public school and author of a book in which he argues for the importance of assigning complete novels. “But I don’t think this sets a high or even effective expectation for what students should do in their third year of high school.”
Ms. Carayol of the College Board acknowledged that reading endurance was important, but said the SAT was not a good test of that skill either.
“Long test passages force students to race through the text looking for answers rather than reading carefully,” she wrote in an email. “There is a huge benefit to a student in these shorter passages. If they feel uncomfortable or disoriented by a passage, they can skip it and come back, rather than having to assign eight to 11 questions to each passage.”
At North Houston Early College High School, Adair Rivera, a 17-year-old junior, will take the SAT in the School Day program. He hopes to become the first member of his immediate family to attend college and study computer science.
Adair said he scores higher on digital practice tests than he did when he took the paper SAT. He hopes to attend MIT or Yale, which require test scores, or the University of Pennsylvania, which does not.
“It’s a game changer,” he said of the shorter reading passages and shorter exam time. “It doesn’t wear students out as quickly.”
Audio produced by Sarah Diamant.
