Starting on January 1st of this year, College Board will only offer a digital SAT. While most students don’t even know what the SAT even stands for, they are all familiar with their importance, especially as top universities are once again making standardized testing mandatory. At two hours and 14 minutes instead of three hours, according to College Board, the digital exam is meant to reduce stress by giving students more time per question, shorter reading passages, and access to an online graphing calculator for the math section.
In 2025, according to the College Board’s data, 1.9 million students took the SAT, while almost 1.4 million took the ACT, another popular college entrance exam administered by ACT Corporation. However, the tables are soon likely to shift as the new SAT has been met with daunting reviews.
Traditionally, because the SAT and ACT exams are so different, high school students take an older version of each one to see which one they want to take prior to registering for an exam. However, since the SAT has developed into an adaptive, digital exam, there are fewer resources available to practice with the materials or the new format. Furthermore, test prep tutors, who typically play a big role in student’s scores, are ill-equipped to advise their students for this uncharted territory. According to Summit Prep, a NJ test tutoring business, when the SAT was revamped in 2016, it took almost two years for the test-makers to find a baseline and predict trends, meaning current juniors and sophomores will be playing guinea pigs.
While there have been mixed reviews of the digital SAT, a common theme for the March test takers was that the math section was particularly challenging despite the access to an online graphing calculator. With College Board’s goal to differentiate exceptional participants amongst top scorers through their adaptive formatting, as students solve math problems correctly, the test generates harder and harder questions. The level of these sorts of questions, while having a higher capacity than the previous test, is also only met by students who demonstrate their ability to handle them. This has caused concern for those who may start the math section poorly, leaving them without a chance to prove themselves, as getting easier questions correct does not help their score since they have already been offsetted from the higher track. Comparatively, the ACT has always been known to have a less rigorous math section as long as students are prepared to answer questions in an average of less than 60 seconds.
Doing well on the ACT over SAT may not have a great deal of significance in college applications. But the stress and intensive preparation disparity between the two options may just be enough to shift the balances for students on the fence towards taking the ACT looking for a less stressful and more familiar testing experience.
The shift to a digital format for the SAT introduces both challenges and uncertainties for students and educators alike. As students navigate this transitional period, so will the college application process. Only time will tell how this drastic change in testing will impact college admissions for the Class of 2025.
