The New and Improved Digital Avatar of the SATs: All You Need to Know
The Spring of 2023 will bring a breath of fresh air for students applying for SAT in the coming years. The College Board has recently announced that the SATs will hereon be conducted digitally.
The international students will be allowed to take the SATs in 2023, followed by the students in the US who will sit for the exam in 2024. The College Board has informed young scholars of the changes in the SAT format as listed below:
- The students will have two hours to take the test instead of the previous duration of three hours.
- Short passages with a single question per passage will replace the lengthy reading text in the ‘Writing and Language Test’.
- An embedded digital calculator will be provided for the Mathematics Section and the students will be allowed to carry their own too.
- The students will be able to access the test on their personal devices provided that they are in the presence of an official invigilator.
Benefits of Digital SATs:
- Flexibility to take the test at the school campus or the test center
- This unique test will prevent security breaches, the duplicity of answers, the exchange of information, and so on.
- Succinct passages that are less time-consuming.
- A feature for flagging of questions would be provided, so that the students can identify questions that are yet to be answered or re-examined faster, instead of scrolling through the entire question-paper.
- There will be no requirement to manually fill in the student details, helping the students get a jump start in the exam.
- Easier and faster access to test scores will be facilitated.
- The online exam dashboard will be easy to navigate and operate.
Things that would remain the same:
- Presence of an examiner is mandatory.
- The same 1600 point scale will be followed.
- Direct connections to scholarships will be available.
- The SAT will continue to evaluate knowledge and skills of the examinees.
- No penalization for wrong answers will continue.
What will be the difficulty level?
An article from Economic Times published on January 28th, 2022 written by the Co-Founder and Director of Collegify, Adarsh Khandelwal, states that the College Board is resolute about integrating more college-level texts into the test questions. However, the reading passages will be made shorter, with only one question assigned to each of them, comparatively decreasing the difficulty level. The College Board has always tried to make this very significant test easier for the scholars who are undertaking it. Let us put our trust in this prestigious institution and do our best to prepare!
The news was made known to the world in the last week of January. The digital format of SAT drew mixed reactions from the students, teachers, college boards and eminent academic institutions. Only time will tell whether the digital format of SAT is a feasible endeavour. Drop a comment to tell us whether you prefer the digital or paper format!
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