By: Nevada Ryan

Here at Great Expectations College Prep, we’ve closely followed the rollout of College Board’s digital SAT ever since its announcement in 2022. With a full year of the test finally behind us—the last National testing date of 2024 was December 7th—it’s an opportune moment to assess the exam’s impact and consider how to prepare for 2025 and beyond. While the test’s advertised advantages—shorter duration, fewer questions, shorter reading passages, standalone verbal questions, increased time per question, the integration of the Desmos graphing calculator across the math section, etc.—have made it attractive to test takers, critical questions remain: how does this new version measure up to its predecessors, and have these changes truly benefited students?

The following is an overview of our experience with the digital SAT’s 2024 debut. As you’ll see, the exam’s role in the testing landscape is still stabilizing. However, while the transition has caused some initial turbulence, the disruptions are temporary, and we’re confident they present opportunities for students to excel in this new testing environment.

New Challenges

1. Adaptive Scoring Realities

Fewer overall questions, while appealing, produces a harsher scoring scale that leaves less room for error. This makes mastery both more difficult and more necessary, particularly for those aiming for top scores. Relatedly, and in contrast to previous SAT iterations—as well as the SAT’s only rival, the ACT—questions are no longer uniformly weighted, which means two different students, or the same student taking two separate tests, can correctly answer the same number of questions yet receive two very different scores, depending on which specific questions were answered correctly or not. This new scoring method, based on something called Item Response Theory (IRT), also produces student scores based on a detail that most students have never considered: “the probability that the pattern of answers suggests they were guessing.” The overall effect is a scoring process that is less transparent and, as a result, less predictable, which means standard prep approaches need to be adjusted commensurately. 

2. Lack of Predictive Material

At the time of this article, there are still only six officially released SAT practice tests on Bluebook, the application that houses College Board’s SAT Suite of Assessments practice material. Not only is this inadequate for students serious about preparation, but a common appraisal of these exams (accurate, in my opinion) is that their scoring scales do not align with those of the official tests, rendering them less predictive of the real thing and thus of questionable utility. (Whether or not that’s technically true, the differences were enough to warrant a report from Forbes back in March, immediately following the first National administration.) While at the National Association for College Admission Counseling (NACAC) conference in Los Angeles last year, I spoke to a College Board representative and tried to find out when more tests might become available. I was told that, while new tests “are coming,” the organization has not yet “found a cadence” for their release—which, I suspect, is a nice way of saying they don’t know. 

3. Substandard Data Reporting

With the last iteration of the SAT, for a few select test dates each year examinees were provided (for a fee) with a copy of the actual test they took, as well as a list of the specific questions they missed, through College Board’s Question and Answer Service (QAS). With the transition to the digital test, no new QAS version has been on offer. When speaking to that same College Board employee at the NACAC conference, I asked about a reinstatement of the QAS, or something analogous, and I was told, in no uncertain terms, that the Question and Answer Service is “not coming back.”

Instead, we now have the Knowledge and Skills Report, which displays a student’s performance across the four content domains for each section. Though better than nothing, I suppose, the resolution is far too low for the report’s utility to approach what the QAS offered; for example, no test copy is ever supplied, and students can’t ever see what specific questions they missed. Furthermore, the accuracy of this new report is questionable: it’s possible to miss questions in a given content domain, yet have the report’s section for that specific domain reflect full accuracy in terms of the darkened bars (see page 6 of this document for an example). Consequently, this feature of the SAT, or lack thereof, poses yet another substantial preparation challenge for students, since performance feedback is now heavily diluted.

4. Poor Logistics

Perhaps the biggest culprit with the digital SAT, however, has been issues with registration and seating availability. Starting in the spring and spilling into the fall, College Board’s logistical fiascos made headlines when testing centers quickly and unexpectedly filled up, causing some students to drive hundreds of miles to take the SAT. As one student wrote for the Los Angeles Times in May, “I live in Northern California, but I’m traveling to Texas to take the SAT on Saturday.” 

Although the news often covered examples in Northern California, I can personally attest to the problem having affected the greater Los Angeles area as well. In June, many of our clients informed us of their inability to find a testing center for the August 24th SAT date, causing them to either postpone their testing date or drive out of town—some even out of state—to take the test. The problem even continued with the October test, but thankfully no longer seems to be an issue. Ultimately these complications, reminiscent of Covid-era cancellations, only heightened the uncertainties for families who were already grappling with the pressures of the admissions process.

New Solutions

Given such shortcomings, the intuition might be to advise students to prepare for the SAT’s rival, the ACT. After all, even despite the test’s upcoming changes (see our post about that for further details), its linear scoring scale offers greater predictability (all questions are weighted identically), official practice material is far more abundant (something like 80+ official ACT tests are floating around online, and we have almost all of them in our library), its Test Information Release service (analogous to the QAS) provides students with more feedback and thus enables more targeted preparation, and its administration efforts, as far as we can tell, appear much less plagued by logistical challenges like the ones mentioned above. 

While that line of reasoning is justified, we needn’t jump to this conclusion just yet.

For starters, the digital SAT’s scoring scale opacity, while less than ideal, is not a net negative. All it requires is that we shift our focus from standard test prep gamification techniques to content mastery and test fluency—the better you know the test content and style, in other words, the less the SAT’s black box scoring scale idiosyncrasies will matter. 

The lack of predictive practice material and reporting data also has a workaround. We’ve been able to address this by partnering with a developer to source proprietary exams that are adaptive, contain a Desmos-integrated graphing calculator, and have an interface that looks identical to Bluebook. Additionally, although the exams—of which we have over 30—are modeled on the official Bluebook tests, they are crafted to be slightly more difficult, ensuring students are adequately challenged. While additional practice tests released officially from College Board—and with scoring scales closer to the actual test—would of course be ideal, our current system has so far proved a superb substitute and yielded excellent results. Additionally, the system’s reporting data also offer a favorable alternative to the Knowledge and Skills report: each report provides students and their tutors with a list of every response for every question, a category tag for every item (so students know what types of questions they need to improve on), and an elapsed time metric, which displays the time it took the examinee to complete each question. These features not only make our reports better than what the Knowledge and Skills report offers, but they are also more detailed than the QAS. 

As for the logistical issues, that may have been an acute problem—based on poor planning, to be sure—brought on by the unexpected announcement of colleges to reinstate testing in admissions. College Board, in other words, was caught off guard when a high influx of students suddenly wanted to take the test, an event unlikely to surprise them again. Even if that isn’t the case, there are two solutions we’ve been advising families to consider: first, register in advance for multiple future test dates to avoid potential scheduling issues if later dates fill up. Second—and this is a highly underutilized option I strongly recommend—take advantage of School Day testing. This occurs when your high school offers the SAT during the regular school day. While not all schools participate, those that do typically inform students through their administrators.

Looking Ahead

Coupled with the ACT’s upcoming enhancements, it’s clear we have a testing landscape that is highly fluid. Despite the less than ideal circumstances, however, the terrain is not unmanageable. Our organization is replete with experienced instructors, all rigorously trained, who have seen various test updates come and go. They are more than capable of guiding students through the fluctuations of this testing landscape with both confidence and clarity. 

For students beginning their test preparation journey, we recommend starting with a diagnostic test for both the SAT and ACT. This allows us to identify which exam aligns better with your strengths and create a customized preparation plan. While many students begin preparing in the summer before junior year, starting earlier—often in sophomore year—can provide greater flexibility. We encourage families to connect with us early to make the most of available timeline options. Whether you’re tackling the digital SAT or have questions about the enhanced ACT, our team is ready to support you. 

Stay tuned to this blog for updates on admissions and standardized testing, and feel free to reach out to learn how we can help you navigate this process.