In October, the PSAT will be digital. As of March 2024, the digital version will be standard. (Except for students with special circumstances who require a paper version of the test. The paper version is going to be reformatted totally to mirror the new digital version.)
My advice for sophomores who want to get the test out of the way before Junior year is to only take it in 2023 if you are sure you can get a good score. No one wants to prep for two essentially different SAT tests.
Unfortunately, there is very little out there for students to practice with, as this test is new. Hopefully College Board will release additional prep materials, but for now, the best options are in the College Board links below.
If you’ve taken it as an international student, please feel free to share your experience here.
Please feel free to add any information or updates to this post.
Here are some links to information about the new digital SAT:
(This ^ contains a link to the paper version of the new test, which might be useful additional practice for those who want extra resources.)
At the end of the day it is just reading and math. The essay is gone anyway. How can it be that different? The format and the medium may change. They are not testing for entirely different skills. I think the use of the calculator is unfortunate though.
I looked at the sample. It is just reading and math. I don’t see it as some big difference. If you have strong reading and math skills, you just go and take the exam. Otherwise you prep your reading and math and go take the exam. That’s how it used to be. You’ll do the same going forward.
Great. If you have info to share about the complete change of formatting as compared to the current test, please feel free to post it here. College Board provides a lot of information about how it is changing.
Not relevant. You can put a reading comprehension question on a piece of paper, or on a screen. In substance, it is the same exercise. If you are seeing differences, I am not sure what to say. Kids don’t have to learn some entirely different kind of math. If they know their math well, there is no separate preparation necessary. You just go and take the test.
Let’s move on from the back and forth. The original post is meant to be informational If anyone want to prepare differently for the exam or have your kids prep differently, feel free. If you all want to prepare the same way, feel free
The worst part it that it is adaptive. I was (and remain) an excellent test-taker who skips problems along the way, an answer comes to me later on in the section as it percolates, suddenly three questions later, I realize I misread something in my subconscious, etc. This is all impossible when you cannot go back. Taking a test where you cannot read the questions ahead (for the reading comprehension section for instance) and then use the information to understand the gist of the questions as a whole is completely different. Each type of test favors some students over others based on test style, but the very top scorers are not always the same. (My 15 year old had to take the new PSAT without prep and her score that year (11th grade) went way down from the year before on old PSAT in verbal- she wasn’t even close to NMF when she would have been based on 10th grade score. Only six weeks later she took the older SAT (pre-2016 version) and got perfect scores on Verbal and English (no prep), so I know from experience that even when they are testing “reading and math” different formats, foci, etc. favor different students.) Personally, and for many students I have taught who take national exams in some subjects, taking an exam on a computer is distracting and their scores are often better on paper. Also, in reading comprehension, when the story is on a computer you cannot mark it up with your pencil to draw attention to things or underline the sentence they are asking about.
I guess it is clear that I really don’t like adaptive tests. I hate that you can’t go back. I hate that it makes every question do-or-die at that moment. I haven’t really been happy since they recalibrated and started major changes to the SAT in the 1990s, but then I was very happy with the old, old SAT of the 1980s and without test prep at all!
Not being able to go back I guess is some change. I am curious how often kids go back, or have the time to go back? So one’s response to this is not about whether you can prep for this change, but more about whether you are a linear thinker or a non-linear thinker.
One more thing about adaptive, now that I consider it.
Adaptive tests make assumptions about what your answer (right or wrong) indicates. These assumptions may be correct for 98% of test-takers, but they will never be correct for everyone. Some of us miss the easy ones only and get the really hard ones. Some people just misread a question. Every time an assumption is used to “adapt” a test, it makes me nervous because for some people who approach things differently or are outside the expected, it won’t work, whereas a written paper test that has maybe two versions in a sitting gives everyone taking it an equal chance.
I think adaptive tests rely too much on “normal” patterns and are thus less equitable for unusual students.
Yes, I think so. Also, both of my children and I all easily finished the verbal sections and went back to check all the answers. (1980s SAT for me, 2015 version D17, and post 2016 version for S23. We are fast readers. It’s math that got both my children!) I think many top scoring Verbal students finish the reading and grammar sections with lots of time left. I’m sure someone finishes math with lots of time to go back, but that was not my family!
I think reading comprehension skills help math skills. Not sure the other way works. You won’t get much help in reading just because you are strong in Math.
You perfectly state why I think this new test is going to be very problematic for a LOT of people.
As a tutor, I expect that ACT will see a huge increase in test takers next year and that it will take a couple of years for SAT to catch up. I’ve been tutoring the SAT and ACT for years. I have yet to meet a test taker, whether a numbers person or a words person, who doesn’t use their pencil in some way on virtually all parts of both tests.
My personal opinion is that there are going to be a lot of teething problems with the new SAT and that College Board will need to find ways to mitigate those problems very quickly.
Feedback for the digital SAT is pretty positive so far, and at 40 minutes shorter than the ACT (2 hours 14 mins vs 2 hours 55 mins), I think many will prefer that.
Students will be able to use pen and paper for notes/figuring and they can flag questions and go back to them.
Can you go back to questions that you have not flagged?
I still dislike using computers and not being able to quickly flip pages and think it will take too much time to go back to questions (I really tend to jump all around pages when I take tests) but I have trouble understanding how it is adaptive as they described if you can go back to any question. Why make it adaptive at all then instead of just a computer version of the regular test?
Yikes! I am reading the Compass link (very helpful, thanks for sending!) and this is a direct quote:
A simple right/wrong tally does not make sense on an adaptive test, which means students will never find out how many questions they got correct or incorrect. Students will not know exactly how their score was determined. A published scale makes little sense when everyone has taken a different exam.
That is one element that scares me!
Also, my son has been in three schools- two regular schools and homeschool. All of them were non-technology friendly (e.g. no cell phones at school, no use of laptops in school). This new format seems to favor students used to/trained in quickly navigating the “highlighting” tool, navigating a computer etc. when we already had a technology that is cheap and has near-universal access for all students: pencils and paper.
I think a major motivator behind the change is cheating. It’s going to be much more difficult to do that with this new format. Or at least, that seems to be the idea.
I agree. I think the attempt to spin it as a “better” test is just that, spin.
It’s really about preventing cheating though I can’t figure out who was cheating and how. Where my children took it (and where I did) it would have been extremely difficult to cheat. They already had measures in place.
You can only go back to questions in the same stage you are in. From Compass:
The SAT is not item-adaptive, where every question varies based on performance (like the GMAT). Rather, it is stage-adaptive (like the GRE). It will only adapt once for Reading & Writing and only once for Math. This lowers the stakes on any one question and also preserves the ability to go backward and forward within a stage.
I do understand the concerns that adults have, but students who have taken the test are generally reporting positive experiences. These students are digital natives. I think the ACT’s days are numbered, because I just don’t see students choosing a three hour exam when they can choose one closer to 2 hours.
And yes some of the drive to digital is to prevent cheating. SAT hasn’t given exams in mainland China for a number of years due to cheating.
