SAT Goes Fully Digital and ‘Adaptive,’ Here’s What to Know

SAT preparation books are seen on a shelf at A Clean Well Lighted Place For Books bookstore in San Francisco, Calif., on Aug. 26, 2003. Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

Tens of thousands of high schoolers across the country this week are waving goodbye to No. 2 pencils and bubble sheets as the SAT goes fully digital. But that’s not the only change for the popular college admissions test.

More than a year after the last paper-and-pencil SAT was given outside of the United States, American students are joining their international peers to take the test exclusively on laptops and tablets via an app called BlueBook, named after the physical exam book in which test takers answered essay questions. The app saves students’ progress while they work, even if they lose internet connection or their device crashes.

The option to take the SAT on paper is no longer available, except for those students who have been granted an accessibility exemption.

The new SAT has fewer questions, so that students have more time to answer each question. It clocks in at just over two hours, compared with the roughly three hours for its former version and the ACT, its largest competitor in the college testing market.

A more important change to the SAT, however, is the way the questions are generated. Essentially, it is giving different students different tests based on their real-time performance.

Adaptive SAT, Explained

The College Board, the non-profit company that develops and administers the SAT, said they have adopted a multi-stage, “adaptive” testing method, meaning that the difficulty of questions they get will change according to how they performed in prior parts of the assessment.

In practice, this adaptive model will allow students who score relatively low on the first half of the test to face easier questions in the second half.

“Each test section (Reading and Writing, and Math) is divided into two equal-length, separately timed parts called modules,” the College Board explained on its website. “You'll answer a set of questions in the first module before moving on to the next. The questions you’re given in the second module depend on how you performed on the first module.”

The first module in each section, according to the College Board, includes half the questions for the section and consists of “a broad mix” of easy, medium, and hard questions across a range of domains. The second will feature, “on average, either of higher difficulty or of lower difficulty than that in the first module.”

When it comes to scoring, the full SAT will still be on a 1,600-point scale, although each question is weighted differently.

Basically, getting more correct answers doesn’t necessarily translate to a higher score, and students who are given a more difficult second module will have the opportunity to earn higher scores by getting more difficult questions correct.

In response to concerns that students may be disadvantaged if they receive easier questions in the second module, the College Board insisted that they won’t.

“You'll be presented with questions tailored for your abilities. You won’t be presented with questions that are much too hard or much too easy,” it said.

The company did not, however, give any advice on how to handle the anxiety when students notice that their exam questions are getting progressively easier rather than harder—an indicator that they’re doing poorly on the previous portion.

“No matter which module you’re routed to, the most important thing to keep in mind is to do your best,” the College Board said. “Your score will be accurate, and you won’t get a lower score just because you saw a lower difficulty set of questions.”

Other Changes

The digital test is more than just moving the old test from paper to a computer screen. For instance, the reading passages are reduced to single paragraphs, since the longer passages didn’t render well on the screen.

On top of that, students will read more than 50 short reading passages, with only one question attached to each reading. The older SAT had nine long passages with multiple questions.

For the Math section, students can use a built-in graphing calculator throughout the test rather than having separate calculator and non-calculator portions.

With all the changes, students are still required to take the SAT in person. They can use their own laptops or tablets, borrow one from their school, or make a prior arrangement for one provided by the College Board.

The digital SAT will be rolled out on Saturday.

Standardized Testing Makes a Comeback

The College Board first rolled out the digital test in 2023, after hundreds of American colleges and universities suspended test score requirements for admissions.

According to FairTest, an education group focused on student evaluation, over 1,800 colleges do not require prospective students to submit SAT scores for the fall of 2025, including those belonging to the state university systems of Texas and California.

At the same time, some of the country’s most prestigious institutions are doing away with their test-optional policies.

In February, Yale University said it will once again require undergraduate applicants to include their scores from at least one of four standardized tests to be considered for admission. Another Ivy League school, Dartmouth College, announced the comeback of SAT score requirements earlier that month.

These test scores serve as a strong predictor of how likely a student would find academic success at the elite institution, said Jeremiah Quinlan, Yale’s dean of undergraduate admissions.

“We found that test scores have continued to predict academic performance in Yale College,” Mr. Quinlan said in an interview with Yale News, the university’s official news magazine. “Simply put, students with higher scores have been more likely to have higher Yale GPAs, and test scores are the single greatest predictor of a student’s performance in Yale courses in every model we have constructed.”

Both Yale and Dartmouth are citing one particular study to back their decisions. This study, conducted by researchers at Dartmouth and Brown University, found that students who submitted ACT or SAT scores achieved better college GPAs than peers who opted not to, and that high school grades do “little to predict academic success in college.”

“Higher SAT/ACT scores are associated with higher college GPAs, even when comparing students from different socioeconomic backgrounds,” the study concluded.