For the foreseeable future, College Board has turned its two standardized tests, the SAT and PSAT, digital. As the SAT is the country’s premier standardized test, this decision will have major consequences for any high schoolers applying for college in the future. Before the change, the SAT was a large pamphlet with four sections: reading(comprehension and critical thinking), writing (grammar and vocab), non-calculator math, and calculator-based math. Each of these sections was approximately 40 to 50 questions long and took approximately an hour to complete.
Now, the digital SAT is split into two sections dubbed modules that solely focus on english and math wholistically. Each module contains two tests that are each around 35 minutes long, with the english tests being 27 questions and the math tests being 22 questions. The second test for each module is also adaptive, which basically means that the difficulty of the questions offered on the second tests are dependent on how well a student scores on the first test of the module. For example, if a student gets a perfect score on their first english test, the questions offered on the second english test will be much harder compared to someone who only got fifty percent of the questions right on the first english test. As the primary reason for making this switch, College Board has stated that a digital SAT allows for more possibilities and would also prevent cheating from students across timezones. “The digital SAT will be easier to take, easier to give, and more relevant. We’re taking full advantage of what delivering an assessment digitally makes possible,” Priscilla Rodriguez, vice president of College Readiness Assessments of College Board, said. It’s also worthwhile to note that switching to a digital SAT will also prevent College Board from wasting thousands of SAT booklets each year, saving both money and paper. While the intentions behind the decision seem sincere and genuine, the new system is most definitely not perfect and possesses numerous flaws that could be potentially detrimental to students’ college applications.
“I think the digital PSAT and SAT is much harder compared to the paper SAT so it kind of gives an unfair advantage to any students who . In addition, the fact that you are equally punished for getting questions wrong on harder sections compared to easier sections seems unfair to me,” Daniel Wong, 11, said.
While I agree with the sentiment that standardized tests should become adaptive as that would favor students on both the higher and lower ends of the spectrum, the scoring utilized by College Board is somewhat archaic. As of right now, College board uses a 1600 points system, or in the PSAT’s case, a 1520 point system, and deducts points for each question a student misses relative to a curve. However, when some students are forced to take more difficult tests compared to others, those students should not be punished in the same way for getting more challenging questions wrong. Instead, College Board should offer a strict point-based system that rewards students for getting questions right instead of punishing them for getting questions wrong. To prevent any variation between students and prevent any situations that harshly penalize students who make careless mistakes especially in the English module, College Board should instead give students a set number of questions at each difficulty and reward points based on each correctly answered question’s difficulty. Of course, this would pose other problems as it would both be psychologically detrimental to students, make the SAT more skewed towards those who dedicate their lives to preparing for it
College Board turning the SAT digital is a step in the right direction. It mirrors the rapid advancement of technology, especially in education and formulates a system that could be potentially advantageous to students of all skill levels and backgrounds. However, with the way students view standardized tests right now, there are a few minor issues with the system that need changing.
