Your Commonly Asked Digital SAT Questions, Answered by Our Learning & Assessment Team

With the transition to a fully digital SAT® Suite now complete, College Board convened a panel at the 2024 Forum to answer educators most commonly asked digital SAT questions. The panel included three colleagues from Learning & Assessment: Ana Menezes, senior vice president, Learning & Assessment, Thomas Proctor, executive director, Psychometrics, and Emily Shaw, executive director, Research & Services.

Can shorter literacy passages really measure the same skills and knowledge as longer passages? 
Menezes explained that the shorter passages and questions on the digital SAT retain the rigor of the longer passages and questions because they maintain the same content domains and text complexity. The design process for the digital SAT included a cognitive lab study, a “think aloud” with students as they took the test to understand their thought processes during testing. Menezes also cited the benefits of shorter passages: space for more topics and perspectives increases engagement, students can choose the best answer and move on knowing that missing one question won’t make or break their score, and a better user experience since students don’t have to scroll from long passages to the questions.

Why an adaptive test and not just a shorter paper test?
Proctor described College Board’s goals in creating a digital test: to maintain the measurement quality of the exam while streamlining the administration experience, to make the test easier to take, and to offer more flexibility for schools to administer. To achieve these goals and maintain the same precision and reliability so K–12 and higher ed can continue to use scores in the same way, the digital SAT needed to have fewer items of higher statistical quality and an adaptive test.

How do we know the digital SAT is predictive of …?
Shaw answered the most common digital SAT research questions, which centered on whether digital SAT scores are predictive of college performance, first year college grades, and college performance for key student subgroups and for STEM majors. Shaw described the predictive validity study, which included administering the digital SAT to students on campus under standardized conditions and information about the students’ first year performance.

Audience Questions: What are the plans to release digital items / more PSAT-related practice tests? Are pretest items always the first two items and are they added into the testing time?
Most of the audience questions focused on digital practice and pretest items. Priscilla Rodriguez, senior vice president, College Readiness Assessments, stood from the audience to help answer. Two more practice tests will be made available for each of the PSAT-related assessments and that number will continue to increase. And thousands more questions will be loaded into the practice question bank. Rodriguez also confirmed that time is added into the test for students to complete pretest questions and noted that pretest items can appear anywhere in the test, not necessarily the first two items.

“They’re embedded for a reason. If students knew which ones they were, they wouldn’t take them seriously,” Rodriguez said. “Please tell your students to take every question seriously. We have easy pretest items and hard pretest items.”