Ben Meyler | Writer
January 28, 2022
Starting 2024, the SAT will be taken exclusively online, College Board announced on Tuesday. The exam, which students will complete on laptops or tablets, will also be shortened from three hours to two hours. These changes are likely motivated by College Board’s need to keep up with changing opinions on standardized testing, as focus is shifting away from the SAT; an increasing number of colleges are eliminating the requirement that students must submit their SAT or ACT scores, and “test-optional” admissions have popularized greatly during the pandemic.
More than 1,800 schools did not require standardized test scores for 2022 admissions. The number of high school students in the class of 2020 that had taken the SAT was 2. (Ambien) 2 million, while the class of 2021 decreased to 1.5 million, and about 1.7 million students in the class of 2022 have decided to take the test, according to the College Board.
In recent years, the SAT has received an increasing amount of criticism from those who say that standardized tests make it unfair for financially disadvantaged and minority students, mainly because they may not have access to the same expensive test preparation courses that privileged students utilize.
“Personally, I most likely will end up taking the SAT. Even though I believe that at this point in time it’s practically a waste of time and energy for most colleges as they aren’t even accepting, I am only planning on taking it because I am an honors student and therefore tend to go above average,” freshman Maya Saunders said. “If it comes to the point where all colleges are becoming test-blind, then I will not bother to take the SAT. But when given the option to display my intelligence, even if the schools I apply to are test-optional, then I’d like to take that advantage and use it.”
“I think that the SAT should be shortened because no kid wants to sit through a three-hour test, especially if it’s now optional,” Saunders said, when asked about the changes in the new SAT. It’s difficult to keep anyone—let alone a teenager’—mentally stimulated for this amount of time. “I prefer to take tests online, so to hear that this will be of option to me when I enter my junior year is super relieving. Practically all of the tests that we take in school nowadays are digital so it’s become extremely natural and comfortable to me.”
While some students support the amending of the SAT, others favor the classic pencil and paper.
“I believe that the SAT should only be taken the traditional way because if it is pushed to all-online [and to two hours instead of three], it takes some of the integrity out of the process of taking the test. The SAT is not only supposed to test what you know but also tests students on how they perform under pressure. The real world doesn’t always cater towards one’s own comfort,” senior Ashten Barr said. The new test “allows people to skip out on being uncomfortable by being under less pressure, not allowing them to pull anything from that experience,” Barr said. She believes these changes will result in less learning and “life skills.”
There are certain complications that come into play when it comes to taking these important assessments online. In her sophomore year, senior Donya Nadjie was excited when she heard that the AP tests were switching to an online version and she could take her AP European History exam in the comfort of her own home. She soon realized that it was just a DBQ when it is normally one multiple-choice section, one DBQ, one LEQ, which is another essay, and multiple FRQs. Though the modified test might have seemed easier for students, in reality, the DBQ accounting for the entire test score put an unreasonable amount of pressure on that one piece of writing. Nadjie discussed how it was especially stressful knowing that there could be a drastic difference in the difficulty of the DBQ depending on the prompt. This made the test unfair, as many different prompts were offered.
Nadjie wrote the DBQ with a fair amount of confidence and finished early, but when she pressed the submit button, it didn’t work. “As I was watching the timer go down, I became more stressed out until the timer dropped to zero and it said that my exam did not submit. I was freaking out and called the AP program and it was a very complicated process to try to get ahold of them, so I texted a few friends and one other person said that the same thing happened to them. After a few hours of trying to reach College Board, they told me that I would need to retake the exam,” Nadjie said.
“A month later, in June, I could retake my exam, and I wrote my essay but it had a completely different prompt about something we didn’t learn about at all during the entire course. I specifically remember being told by my teacher that this lesson was unnecessary,” Nadjie said. “I sadly didn’t receive a high enough score to pass my second exam. My original prompt for my first exam was a breeze and I knew I would’ve passed it, so I was extremely saddened when my submission button didn’t work.”
Though the SAT is standardized and will not include an essay, so everyone will see the same content, the changes still might bring unforeseen stress. With a much shorter test, there will be more weight on each question, which could be a challenge for some.
There have been no previous issues with traditional scantron tests, but as the world continues to progress in a digital direction, so does the classroom. We have seen these changes happen very quickly, and especially after spending a year doing online schooling, the digital shift will continue to progress.
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