I recently embarked on a Billy Madison-esqe journey that required me to take an official SAT in order to inherit my father’s brake pad company (or maybe that was Tommy Boy)… Anyway, the paper exam I took years ago has undergone multiple revisions since. According to those who’ve taken the test in the past, the new test is much easier: way shorter–only 98 questions, much less vocabulary, shorter reading passages, an extremely powerful graphing calculator … and the whole test is digital!
Everything I’d read about the new Digital SAT suggested this test would be a cinch as an adult–easy 1600 coming! So, in the spirit of my high school days, I spent an entire week before the exam cramming as much as I could for a total of 10 hours worth of study time. (WARNING: This is not how you should prepare for the SAT). I completed the BlueBook practice exams available through CollegeBoard, averaging around 1550 per exam, and headed into the real exam feeling reasonably confident that I would outperform the high school students taking the exam alongside me. And then exam day came…
Let me be the first to say that forcing people, particularly high school students, to wake up at 6AM on a Saturday to take the most important exam of their lives is as anachronistic as using a sundial to keep time during the exam. This is to say nothing of the fact that I needed to travel over an hour and a half to the test center since CollegeBoard canceled my registration at the high school 10 minutes from my house. I genuinely sympathize with the many students who have to deal with this stress inflicted by CollegeBoard on top of the anxiety surrounding actual exam performance.
Fortunately, I did arrive at the test center on time, though I was still very sleepy. It was a surreal experience to sit in a high school classroom filled with teenagers again. Special shoutout to the one student who came over to me and asked if I was the teacher proctoring the exam that morning; I did my best Steve Buscemi, not sure how you spotted me. Anyway, after a few procedural tasks, it was finally test time.
If you’re unfamiliar with the new test format, it’s a wild ride. To account for the shorter length, the test is now adaptive, meaning that your performance on the first Reading & Writing section and the first Math section determines the difficulty of the second respective sections. This results in a very disparate testing experience. Bluntly, the first sections are childishly easy. I wouldn’t be surprised if an adept 8th grader could ace those sections. The second sections, however…
I finished the first section for Reading & Writing with more than enough time to work through the section twice and check all my answers; safe to say I crushed that section. The difficulty jump from the first baseline section to the second hard section, however, caught me off guard. The text of the Reading & Writing became way more dense and the answer choices more similar, significantly increasing the amount of time required to solve each question. I went from finishing with over 10 minutes left on the first Reading & Writing section to finishing the second section with less than a minute left–not even enough time to go back and check answers.
The math portion of the exam followed the same pattern. The first math section was preposterously easy; at least 75% of the questions could be solved just by typing the equation into the calculator–no math knowledge needed whatsoever. Again, I finished with well over 10 minutes remaining–more than enough time to work through the section again and look for any careless errors. But the second section totally cooked me. Everything in this section was going well until I looked up at the clock and realized I had 5 minutes left with 5 questions to go–not good! I ended up needing to guess on about 4 questions, not because I couldn’t solve them, but simply because I didn’t have the time to solve them. So much for the shorter, easier exam…
Like many students, upon completing the exam, I immediately went to Reddit to see if other students had the same questions as me and if we came up with the same answers. Of course, there was nothing to be learned since discussing CollegeBoard questions is against the TOS, but based on what I definitely did not read there, I probably got between 4 and 6 questions wrong that I currently know of. Perhaps the more interesting discovery was the number of students claiming to have seen identical questions in both their BlueBook practice exams and on official SAT exams that they had taken previously. I certainly recognized a handful of questions I had seen in my minimal BlueBook practice too. Maybe this was always the way the old paper exams were constructed too, but I don’t ever recall hearing of students receiving identical questions they had seen previously on the real SAT. Not sure what this says about the validity of the test, but if you are a student preparing, make sure to do all the official CollegeBoard practice questions–some of them will appear on your real exam verbatim; don’t miss out on easy points!
Overall, as prepared as I was, having worked in test prep for many years, the new digital format caught me off guard: Yes, the test is generally easier in terms of content; Yes, the test is significantly shorter; Yes, you have access to tools that make answering many complex questions incredibly simple; but like much of life, in the end, it may simply come down to timing. And the timing on the Digital SAT is very tight. So, what does that mean for students? Practice! Practice with a timer. Practice under real test conditions. Practice with challenging materials. Practice to make sure you can solve questions in the most efficient manner possible. And practice official questions since they may appear on your real exam! While any standardized test can be challenging, the more time you spend familiarizing yourself with the language and patterns of the test, the more deft you’ll be when taking the real exam.
(And don’t worry! Even though I don’t have my score yet, I totally graduated high school again and I’m now the proud owner of my father’s brake pad business.)
