Digital PSAT Administered at NRHS This October

By Nola Brooks

The SAT is a very familiar and highly controversial standardized test that many colleges and universities all over the world use in admissions to measure student readiness. This year, it’s undergoing major change. NRHS sophomores and juniors experienced the new digital format of the PSAT in October, and starting in March 2024, all SAT exams in the country will be given digitally. According to the College Board, the changes also include a shorter length, digital testing resources, adaptive testing, and more concise questions and readings. Finally, personalized guidance about college and career options has been added to the score reports students receive. The digital SAT, which will be almost an hour shorter than the paper SAT, will have four modules: two dedicated to reading and writing and two dedicated to math. Adaptive testing means that the difficulty of the questions in the second module of each section will depend on how well the student does on the first modules. 

The College Board claims that digitization will make the exam more relevant to modern education and that their other changes will make the test easier to take and administer. Another contributing factor that they may have neglected to mention is that over 80% of four-year colleges are now test-optional for admissions, which means that less students are opting to take the test, and the organization is losing profit. According to the College Board, 700,000 fewer students took the test at least once in 2021 than in 2020. The new, less stressful format could be more accessible to students who may doubt their abilities and avoid the test as a result. It seems that their changes have had the intended effect, because College Board reports that most students and proctors in experimental runs administered last year agreed that the new format was less overwhelming and smoother.

But not everyone is sold on the changes. At NRHS, two current juniors expressed concerns about the implications of the new test. Having experienced the paper PSAT during sophomore year and the digital one this year, Lily Ferrante said that she preferred the feel of the paper version, adding that “we’re going digital with a lot of things.” Many students experiencing these types of changes in real time can feel frustrated having to make adjustments to their studying and testing strategies. Further, fewer resources are available to study for the new format. “The tutors I talk to that do ACT and SAT are concerned because although there’s practice out there, there’s no full test that has ever been given before, so they don’t really know what to do,” said Lea Cohen. 

Students and educators are unsure what exactly the test will be like. Some educators, including a writer for thefederalist.com, say that this change simplifies the SAT, which they worry could mean that more people will score highly and that the SAT will therefore lose value as a metric. However, according to the College Board, the new test has supposedly been very carefully designed to have the same level of difficulty as the old one. One countermeasure to the changes that will make the SAT easier is the harsher scoring. In some cases, getting a single question wrong could reduct 20 points from a student’s final score (c2educate.com). Even though the process of taking it might feel easier, the test itself is not actually easier.

The digitization of the SAT has certainly generated debate, but this is far from the first time that the test has been a contentious topic. According to bestcolleges.com, the man who created the SAT in the 1920’s, Carl C. Brigham, developed it after collaborating to create the Army IQ test. He was a eugenicist who believed the SAT could be marketed as an objective measure of “scholastic aptitude” and serve to show that black people have inferior intelligence, and he was worried that the quality of higher education would decline as more students of color became part of it. Therefore, there was bias in the original test that prevented people of color from scoring highly and therefore prevented integration of colleges and universities. Despite arguments by the SAT’s proponents that the test provided equal opportunity by identifying any and all intelligent and talented students, Brigham himself eventually admitted that it tested “a composite including schooling, family background, familiarity with English and everything else, relevant and irrelevant." For example, it would test words that white students would be more likely to recognize because of certain aspects of the culture prevalent in their communities. 

The exam did not provide an objective view of a student’s intelligence, which is likely indeterminable in the first place. As discussed by bestcolleges.com, there are so many factors outside of innate intelligence that can influence SAT score, including but not limited to the amount of time a student studies, the predisposition of how they think for the format of the exam, and the study resources they have access to. Besides these factors, the original SAT contained evident racism, which caused many to view it as invalid at the time. Many present-day educators and antiracists, including some writing for nea.org, believe that the current form is still invalid or unreliable as a metric. While the SAT has addressed many of its original issues through efforts like providing low income students with study resources and fee waivers, it is still far from unbiased. Students living in less funded school districts and communities and students with less knowledge about and encouragement to pursue higher education often have to work much harder and be more self-motivated to get competitive scores. According to a Harvard study this year, students in the wealthiest 1% of U.S. households are 13 times more likely than students in low income households to score 1300 or higher on SAT and ACT tests. People of color are also more likely to be economically and otherwise disadvantaged, so a considerable degree of racial bias remains. 

Still, it seems unlikely that the SAT will go away anytime soon. College Board reports that 1.5 million highschoolers took the test at least once in 2021. It’s a data point in admissions that can help boost a student’s chances, and as long as it remains that way, College Board and the wider community have to continue making it more equitable.