This spring, the SAT will be entirely online, replacing traditional scantrons and paper packets. The English section was revised by replacing long passages associated with five to six questions with a short paragraph for each individual question.

Switching to a digital SAT proves to be methodical. For instance, the majority of learning now takes place online, so an online SAT keeps up with this modern form of education. Similar to online classwork, the digital SAT saves paper, as printing test packets is no longer necessary. Since the test is automatically scored, scoring is more efficient, because it no longer is manually scored.

The digital SAT will also reduce cheating by denying students the ability to flip to previous sections. Improvements to accessibility is also a benefit, as students will be able to zoom in and out as necessary, which is more accommodating to students with vision disabilities.

Despite this, there are many problems with this shift: one of them being unreliability. Technology tends to malfunction when users try to access it all at once. Similar technical issues arose with rollouts of digital AP exams, and there is a high risk this persists for the digital SAT. However, the biggest disadvantage of the digital SAT is the unfairness towards groups of students who took it previously.

The change to digital is not where the unfair differences ends, as the English portion has also been completely altered. 

Previously, the English Language portion of the SAT consisted of a short story or passage followed by five to ten questions about the themes, character developments, word choice, and more. Not only did it test students’ ability to understand a text, but also challenged them to read in a timely fashion and practice annotating. The new SAT has replaced the long passages with short two to three sentence blurbs followed by a singular question. Students no longer have to focus on character development, themes and details that make this portion of the SAT challenging. Instead, they will be asked questions that heavily revolve around vocabulary, such as “What is the best word choice for this blank?” “What is the meaning of the underlined words as used in the sentence?” 

Similar questions that will be asked are, “How does the underlined sentence convey significance in the paragraph?” 

These questions have always been asked on the SAT, but answering them from a short paragraph is a much simpler concept than answering them from a story or article.

Overall, the new SAT changes may create a gap between the scores of paper versus digital test takers.

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