Recently, there have been some new updates to the USA’s standardized college admission testing known as the SAT. Starting in the 2023-24 school year, the SAT will be fully digital and shorter in length, aiming to make cheating harder and grading easier.
The transfer to digital has been in the making for the last year. In March 2023, international SAT organizations promoted the online testing route. In the fall of 2023, PSAT testing centers went digital, leading US test centers to follow suit.
Before test day, students must download a digital testing app, ensuring that tests will be saved even if the device restarts or dies. The test can be taken on a personal laptop, tablet, or school-registered device. During the test, students have access to digital tools, such as a highlighter, bookmark, and graphing calculator, which are permitted for the entire math section. It will also be much shorter, cutting the time by an hour. The reading section is shorter and combined with the writing section, meaning students get more time per question, and only one question is required per passage.
This change has mixed reviews at Ida B. Wells High School.
“I think the sudden change to online is kind of jarring after a majority of my grade got used to paper tests,” said Drake Christiansen, a junior at IBW.
On top of this, many colleges in the U.S. have started to require SAT and ACT scores for college admissions. Brown, Yale, and Dartmouth universities recently reinstated their SAT/ACT requirements.
Bruce Sacerdote, a Dartmouth economics professor, co-authored a study that showed him that Dartmouth was skipping over some students by being test-optional. “We can see in the data: oh wow, that student, boy, they had a 1450. We didn’t even know that. And they were not admitted to Dartmouth,” he said. Sacerdote thinks it’s important to understand test scores and consider them in college applications.
However, this doesn’t mean other colleges will follow suit. According to NPR, over 1,900 colleges are currently test-optional, and “what works for Dartmouth won’t work for everyone.” On top of this, College Board testing is usually circumstantial. It’s impossible to base college admissions solely on test scores because it’s important to consider the student’s situation. For example, students from disadvantaged backgrounds typically score lower on standardized tests. Higher test scores have also been linked to higher income, according to studies shown by The New York Times. Students whose parents’ income was in the top 1% were 13 times as likely to score 1300 on the SAT than the bottom 20% of parent income.
Additionally, gender seems to have an impact on the SAT, or at least, how it should be considered.
“Statistically, women do worse on the SAT, which is a test that’s supposed to predict how well you do in college, but in reality, women do better than men when it comes to the real thing,” said Helen Mildenberger, a junior at IBW. And yes, this is true. Princeton University found that two factors, gender bias and gendered test-taking habits, impacted the standardized tests. Despite this though, Princeton also recognized another trend. “of students who graduated high school in 2016, girls show superior high school records when compared to boys,” wrote Dr. Susan Osborn, an award-winning scholar and author. “As well, more girls than boys studied four years of high school math and natural sciences.”
These new changes are going to take time for the IBW community to adjust to and account for, but ultimately, they might improve college acceptance rates for students and reduce the chances of cheating. It will still take time to work through the other challenges of the SAT, and hopefully, we see improvement in the following years.
