One thing I’ve noticed with my SAT students is how wildly ill-informed–and misinformed–they are about the Digital SAT. Now, it’s not any different with students from before December 2023 when the paper test was still being administered. However, given the robust changes that were made back in March, I feel that it is important to share some important information that parents and students may not be aware of when it comes to the Digital SAT.
1) The Algorithm
One of the major changes in the SAT this March was the implementation of an algorithm that governs the test’s difficulty and the scoring (more on this in the next section). Concerning the former, the SAT now gives students two separate English/math modules depending on their performance.
For instance, if a student does very well on the first English module, the second English module will be comparatively difficult compared to the second English module administered to students who did poorly on the first English module. Here’s a visual representation of how that works, straight from College Board itself:
I always tell my students two things about the adaptivity of the test: 1) not all questions are weighed the same (as they used to be on the paper test), and 2) it is advantageous to trigger the harder module. That is because the algorithm assigns more value to the harder questions, and while students aren’t exactly doomed if they get the easier second module, it is preferable to get more hard questions in front of you to maximize your score potential.
2) Changes in Scoring
This change to the SAT has surprisingly gone under the radar for a lot of my students despite being one of the most important changes to the test. As I mentioned previously, the SAT has altered how it scores test-takers. I’ll let College Board explain itself here [bold added]:
“In the scoring model used for the digital SAT Suite, the scores students receive are a product of several factors, characteristics of the questions they answered right or wrong (e.g., the questions’ difficulty levels), and the probability that the pattern of answers suggests they were guessing.”
This last part is very important because it can affect students’ scores in a myriad of ways. For one, students who get the same number of questions right won’t always get the same scores. Second, and in that same vein, it is entirely possible to get every single question right and not get a perfect score. And that leads me to my last (and focal) point: the test’s algorithm will determine if you were guessing or not.
Now, a lot of students freak out when I say that, and this is why I referenced College Board’s phrasing here. College Board states that they’re looking for “patterns of…guessing,” meaning that their algorithm isn’t nit-picking through a student’s answers for a single guess on an entire module of 20-odd questions. Most likely, they’re looking for classic, last-minute strings of Cs at the end of a module, and if you happen to get lucky with a correct answer in that string, College Board won’t give you as much credit as they will for a student who legitimately took their time to answer the question properly. So, make sure you give each question its due!
3) The Difficulty of the Test
Many students falsely believe that a shorter test is somehow easier. Yes, the SAT is much shorter compared to its paper counterpart, but in my experience, it is comparatively much harder. Specifically, the Reading portion (the first half of the English modules) is still arguably the most difficult part of the SAT. While the SAT Reading section has always been difficult for students, the Digital SAT seems to have dialed up the difficulty (even though the passages are much, much shorter).
So, when students take the Digital SAT and get a score much lower than they were expecting, I have to explain that the question difficulty (and, for what it’s worth, the difficulty of comparing the answers) can outweigh the length of the passages (which was a major hurdle for students who took the paper SAT). Just as much focus is needed to succeed on the Digital SAT as was required for the paper SAT.
Sources: https://satsuite.collegeboard.org/sat/scores/understanding-scores/how-scores-are-calculated
