Starting spring 2023, the College Board, the makers of the SAT, will start administering the digital version of the SAT internationally. The digital test will be administered in the USA starting spring 2024, and the PSAT will be administered starting fall 2023. The class of 2025 will be the first U.S. class to experience the PSAT and SAT’s move to a digital, adaptive format.
What remains the same?
Despite the new overhaul, the SAT will remain on a 400-1600 point scale, and will continue to test the areas of math, reading and writing though it won’t be in the same format at it was with the paper form. The skills being currently tested will be similar to the ones that will be tested on the new adaptive digital version. And, in fact, the material will be nearly identical to what was being tested on the paper version, including reading skills, conventions of standard English, and nonlinear and linear algebra.
What changes with the Digital SAT?
Adaptive:
Though it will be digital in nature, the SAT will not be a take home test and will continue to be proctored and administered during the school day or over the weekend. The change will be more in the overall format, including shortened test time, and the use of a calculator throughout the math sections. Besides going digital, one of the most dramatic changes is that the SAT will be adaptive, which means that the level of difficulty on subsequent questions will change depending on how well the student is progressing. The new digital SAT is not question-adaptive, where every question varies based on performance, rather it is module adaptive. The new digital format will consist of two modules of varying difficulty. After the completion of the first module, one of two potential second modules will be administered to the student depending on how they have progressed up until that point. There are 2 stages combined for Reading and Writing, and 2 stages for Math. It will adapt only once after the Reading and Writing stage, and once after the completion of the Math stage.
Scoring:
The score range will still be between 400-1600. However, as the test will be adaptive, a right or wrong answer will no longer determine the score. Instead the College Board will be using Item Response Theory (IRT) to scale the exams. Students will not know exactly how their score will be determined, and comparing one another will be difficult as each student will be taking a different exam. IRT is a complicated model that produces an optimized view of which questions and weightings place a student within a particular score range. As always, the focus of each student should be to just do the best they can do, and get the most questions they possibly can get correct. Students will not have access to their problems as College Board will reuse some of the questions for future exams.
Shortened Time:
The exam will change from a 3-hour to a 2-hour and 14 minutes test. Those students that require special accommodations (e.g. Braille) will continue to take the test in a non-adaptive paper and pencil format, which will continue to be 3-hours long.
Test Format and Question Changes:
The Reading and Writing sections will be combined in the new adaptive digital SAT. The reading questions are presented in the first half of the Reading and Writing section, and the writing questions are presented in the second half of each Reading and Writing section. The reading passages are much shorter (25-100 words in length) and there is only 1 question per passage instead of the longer passages (600-700 words) with multiple questions in the paper version. Bar and line graph and questions referring to tables will be simplified. The writing questions will no longer have “No change” as an answer choice.
For the Math section, calculators are permitted throughout the exam. Every question stands on its own, and does not share common info with others. Imaginary and complex numbers are no longer tested, and student-response questions can now have negative answers.
Each section is broken into 2 stages: Reading and Writing has 2 stages of 27 questions in 32 minutes, and Math has 2 stages of 22 questions in 35 minutes. All students take the digital SAT in the following order: Reading and Writing Stage 1, Reading and Writing Stage 2, Math Stage 1 and Math Stage 2. The first stage of each section is not adaptive and will have a range of questions and difficulty. After the first stage is completed, the test will choose which of the two modules is the appropriate level of difficulty. One of the modules will be on average easier than the other. Both modules will contain a mix of easy, average and harder questions. Students will have the ability to move back and forth between questions, but only within the stage they are currently working within.
Section Content:
The content of the digital SAT will be similar to that of the paper and pencil version with a few changes to the relative frequencies of the topics.
Reading and Writing:
- Craft and Structure: ~28%
- Words in context
- Text structure and purpose
- Cross-text connections
- Information and Ideas: ~26%
- Central ideas and details
- Command of evidence – quantitative or textual
- Inferences
- Standard English Conventions: ~26%
- Expression of Ideas: ~20%
- Rhetorical synthesis
- Transitions
Math (calculator permitted throughout):
- Algebra: ~35%
- Advanced Math: ~35%
- Problem-Solving and Data Analysis: ~15%
- Geometry and Trigonometry: ~15%
Approved calculators, or the testing application’s built-in calculator, can be used on all math questions.
For information on the NEW DIGITAL SAT, please click on it’s link to be directed to the exam’s page.
When is the SAT offered?
Check to see when the SAT is being offered.