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What is the Digital SAT?
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Although the name of the test makes it sound like students will be able to take it at home, the Digital SAT can only be taken in official testing centers. Students can bring their own laptops or tablets to the test center and will be given information on how to download the testing app before they arrive.
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When are these changes happening?
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College Board is planning to make a hard cutover from paper-and-pencil tests to the Digital SAT with international (non-U.S.) students starting with the March 2023 test administration. In the fall of 2023 the Digital PSAT will be given, and finally, the Digital SAT will be the only option for U.S. students starting with the March 2024 test administration.
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What additional changes will we see on the Digital SAT?
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The test will be shorter. There will be fewer questions and a shorter timeframe in which to answer them, taking the test from around 3 hours down to about 2 hours.
It will become an adaptive test. This means that for each of the two sections (Reading and Writing, Math), there will be two modules. The difficulty level of the second section (easier or harder) in each subject is determined by your performance on the first section. If you get lots of questions right on the first section, you will get a harder second section, but access to higher scores. If you don’t get as many questions right on the first section, you will get an easier second section and your scoring potential is capped at a lower range.
Reading and Writing and Language will be combined into one Reading and Writing section. concepts will now be tested with one short passage per question instead of having several questions attached to only a handful of long passages. This will allow the test to feature a wider range of genres and levels of text difficulty and will allow students to get to the information they need in a passage more quickly. The College Board has also hinted at new verbal question types but won’t release specifics until this summer.
The Digital SAT will not have a “no calculator” section, and the testing app will feature a built-in Desmos graphing calculator. Students can still bring in their own approved calculators, though, if they choose to. The College Board has also indicated that math questions will be less wordy, but there is no concrete information about what that means just yet.