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As you might have heard, the College Board recently announced plans to release a redesigned, all-digital SAT in spring 2024. While every new change in test format creates a lot of buzz (which is part of College Board’s PR strategy as they fight for market share), these changes won’t likely be relevant to current high school students for a few reasons:

• Current 10th-12th Graders won’t be eligible for the new test by admissions deadlines, so they don’t need to worry about this!
  
• Current 9th graders probably won’t need to worry about this. While current 9th graders could take the digital SAT beginning in spring of 11th grade, we typically advise students to wrap prep before then anyway: prep should begin by spring break of 10th grade to leverage the summer before 11th grade begins. Since switching formats midway through the process is inadvisable, this class should plan to finish prep for the current SAT by December 2023 or choose the ACT for a consistent experience.
• Current 8th graders or younger can consider the new SAT, but there is risk in engaging with a new format before we have ample historical materials and data to support prep, so current 8th graders should likely plan on the ACT, which already presents significant advantages (currently, around 70% of our students end up taking the ACT compared to 30% for SAT).

Even when we have greater confidence in both volume and quality of prep materials and score concordance from a college perspective, the digital SAT may not be preferable in most cases.

Many of the proposed SAT changes – such as a shorter test, shorter reading passages, and increased calculator allowance – may make testing “easier,” but the SAT is still scored on a curve: if the changes make the test easier for your student, it’s easier for all students, so the percentile distributions should stay roughly the same. Students who can overcome some of the current SAT’s challenges such as endurance, precision in the long Reading passages, and skilled Math calculation could actually be disadvantaged from leveling the field in those areas.

The one change that will likely present a new strategic advantage is the digital SAT’s change to an adaptive format: this means that both sections (Reading+Writing and Math) will be split into 2 separate parts. Based on how well the student performs on the first part, they will be algorithmically assigned an easier or harder second part, which means early section performance will be vital in determining their score potential – only students who receive the most difficult second part will be able to achieve top scores.

Based on our experience tutoring other adaptive digital tests such as the GMAT and GRE (which follows the very same format) over the last decade, strategizing around the test’s adaptive logic will be an area where future SAT takers can distinguish themselves. While the broad, non-adaptive focus of the ACT Math, for example, rewards focusing on general coverage of material and has a generous margin of error (enabling students to miss around 10% of questions for a top score), adaptive tests require mastering concepts and their application fully before moving on and shifting away from pacing emphasis until that mastery is complete. Strategy for adaptive tests focuses on precise skill for every early problem more than cumulative accuracy, and test-takers who prep accordingly have the potential to jump ahead of their peers on the scoring curve. 

We look forward to eventually leveraging the new SAT materials for future classes of students whose diagnostics show a clear advantage for that test, but for the next few years, we’ll continue to prep strategically with the current test formats that give us the more robust practice materials to use for the content being tested (which will remain the same).

One final advantage on any format of the test is an early start- we’ve found, overwhelmingly, that prep before the start of junior year (especially over the summer) capitalizes on students’ increased bandwidth before the crush of junior year academics and extracurriculars, and many of our students who start prep in 10th grade are finished by summer or early fall. We encourage all 10th grade families who haven’t yet done so to reach out about ACT/SAT diagnostics and a complimentary tutor consultation to get intel on starting scores, timeline, and challenges!