Juniors Ahna Chang, Amelia Mohamadi, and Aishi Sethi study a practice SAT exam. (Charlotte Park ’23)
At the end of January, the College Board announced that their widely-used standardized test, the SAT, would undergo serious changes. 2023 international students and all 2024 students will take a new version. The biggest changes include the move to a digital platform for all, a shorter test time, and shorter reading and math sections.
However, Scott Hill, the director of college counseling at Barstow, says that “For some students, yes, there’ll be a little bit of a change. But, for standardized testing overall, whether it’s the ACT or SAT, I don’t think it’s anything to get excited about because there are a growing number of students that are applying test-optional”, and these test scores are only one factor.”
The SAT will still be scored on a 1600-point scale, and the main sections of math and reading will stay the same.
However, the test will now be given online (but still proctored by the administration of the test). A problem that could arise is a faulty connection to the internet. Although the test is now approximately two hours instead of the current three, sustaining an internet connection for that long is not certain. In 2020 when COVID-19 moved AP exams online, many students reported having problems with the College Board website and their internet.
The College Board plans to curb the effects of this problem by saving a student’s work if their internet does go down during the test. Additionally, no time would be lost.
Mr. Hill explains that these precautions ”alleviates some of the problems students were having at home [during 2020 AP exams] when four or five people working from home and then all of a sudden would lose connectivity.”
Still, internet problems could make a student stressed and affect their performance on the test.
Another significant change is the type of questions. The questions will now be adaptive, which means that the level of difficulty of the questions will be determined by the student’s answers. This also means that the tests will no longer be identical. Among other changes, the reading section will also have shorter passages that have only one question assigned to each passage, and there will also no longer be a “no calculator” math section.
Sophomore Sriram Pattabiraman feels strongly about this change, especially in regards to the new adaptive format.
“I don’t think they [College Board] will be able to adapt it properly, and since I don’t think they’re actually giving more points or less points, depending on which questions you take, that will require anyone who wants to actually use your score to have to look at which questions you took,” Pattabiraman (‘24) explains. “This seems to just be putting a bunch of barriers in the way of actually understanding how good a student is.”
Such dramatic changes to the SAT are not unprecedented. This change will be the 17th major revision since the test’s conception in 1926. The last revision was in 2016, when the SAT shifted to a 1600 scale from the 2400 scale. It was also altered to emphasize reasoning skills and isolation.
These changes will supposedly make the SAT more accessible and easier. It is uncertain, though, how much this will affect which standardized test students will take. At Barstow, sophomores take the PSAT and P-ACT in the fall and are encouraged to take whichever test they score higher on.
Junior Ahna Chang states that she “chose to take the ACT because when I took the PSAT and P-ACT, I did better on the P-ACT.”
For more information on the digital SAT, students can meet with Mr. Hill in the college counseling office.
