The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of the New SAT (Part 2 of 3: The Bad)

On January 25, 2022, the College Board announced that the SAT will be shortened to two hours and become all digital.    International exams will change in 2023; U.S. exams, following year.  Like the widespread adoption of test-optional admissions policies that likely prompted this move, the recently announced changes to the SAT will likely have some “good,” some “bad,” and a few “ugly” effects.  As a test prep coach and SAT tutor since 1991, I’ve written here about the positive impact of the abbreviation of the current three-hour exam to two hours and its digital transformation.  Let’s continue below with some less sanguine outcomes.

SAT tutor worries about careless errors

Gen Z and Gen Alpha students will likely applaud the new, entirely digital exam. Their Gen X SAT tutor knows that many of these same students, however, will struggle with transferring problems correctly from a screen to scratch paper.  Others will choose different answers on the screen than they’d intended in their calculations on paper.  And these challenges exist for the students who actually use their scratch paper.  Many will not go even that far, attempting to arrive at the answer in their heads.

“Surely, you jest!” cry Gen X, Baby Boomer, and older Millennial parents.  “Kids will never attempt to factor a quadratic equation or calculate the sine of an angle in their heads!”

Image by @Elisa_Ventur on Unsplash

Online tutor cautions against calculating without paper

Since July 2020, I've waged a sly but steady battle against “doing math” in one’s head.  As an online SAT tutor, I can tell when a student isn’t writing down a problem.  But I guess “classroom” teachers had more difficulty doing so when math class was held over Zoom.  Unfortunately, students acquired some bad habits during distance learning, and I don’t see them disappearing yet.  Left to their own devices (literally and figuratively!), I fear that these students will find transferring problems to scratch paper cumbersome and eschew it altogether.

The digital test will “adapt” to student performance

The small percentage of students who do use their scratch paper effectively and never make careless errors choosing an answer a foot or more from their calculations (who are these children?) will still need to worry about another aspect of the digital SAT.  This new SAT will be “adaptive.”  An algorithm will set the difficulty of the second section of the test based on the student’s performance in the first.  

Strong students will need to prepare psychologically for a second-half shift

The College Board claims that this new feature will more accurately reflect a student’s score (still based on a 1600 scale).  But students who do well out of the gate will need to learn to expect a more difficult second half, when they are more fatigued to begin with.  (I also wonder whether certain students may try to game the system, doing more poorly than they might otherwise to receive an “easier” second half of the exam from the algorithm.)  

Online SAT tutor worries about disadvantaged students who won’t be told about this shift

Early adopters will need to prepare psychologically, as well as academically, for a test whose difficulty changes midstream, and I’m not confident that this information will make its way into disadvantaged high school.  But that’s more fodder for the final section in this tripartite post, “the ugly.”

To read about some of the potential “ugly” effects of the digital SAT coming in 2023/24, click here.

To review the potentially valuable effects, click here.