The digital SAT officially arrived in the US when students across the country opened their computers on Saturday, March 9th. Adair Rivera, a junior at North Houston Early College High School, summed things up perfectly when he told The New York Times: “It’s a game changer,” he said of the shorter reading passages and shorter exam time. “It doesn’t wear out students as fast.”
A number of Bespoke students took the inaugural digital test. Here’s a quick summary of their impressions:
(Mostly) Trouble-Free Technology. Compared to the tech-plagued PSAT in October, the first SAT went smoothly, with a handful of easily fixed glitches but no showstoppers.
Adaptive Testing–in Action. For both the Reading and Writing (R&W) and Math sections, the difficulty of questions in the second module depends on the student’s performance in the first module. Our testers that reached the second “hard” modules encountered a steep difficulty curve from the outset, which leveled off with tough questions all the way to the end.
A Fast Clock. With fewer questions, the new test times out at two hours and fourteen minutes, almost an hour less than its predecessor. And yet, because of increased difficulty and complexity of questions on the second “hard” modules, for both R&W and Math, students reported time challenges.
A (Very) Hard Math Module II. Students found this section more difficult than they anticipated. They pointed to a combination of factors: relatively more complex content, more complicated versions of familiar problems, and more conceptual thinking rather than number crunching.
No Shortcuts for the Most Difficult Questions. The questions at the end of both the R&W and Math hard modules required students to bring their “A games” in close reading and problem solving. The longer, more complex last R&W passages required deep comprehension. The last Math questions dispensed with workaround strategies, instead asking students to solve esoteric problems in one specific way.
The next digital SATs are scheduled for May 4th and June 1st. Many students will also be taking the test at their schools throughout the spring. So the time to start practicing is now.
