College Board Says It Made Changes to SAT Design to Reduce Stress Among Students
The United States conducted the Scholastic Assessment Test (SAT) entirely digitally for the first time on Saturday, and students were less than impressed.
According to one student from Brooklyn, New York, who has already taken two paper-and-pencil tests, Saturday's college admissions exam was “the worst one yet.”
Additionally, the all-digital test is designed to be “adaptive,” meaning that the difficulty of questions will change depending on students' performance in previous sections, the New York Post reported.
“I suspect it was a lot harder for the kids who did well because it's an adaptive test now,” said Ben Morden, Manhattan's representative to the City Council of Secondary Schools.
The College Board has defended its decision to omit difficult questions, despite criticism that the 98-year-old exam is “dumbed down,” stating that easier questions will not harm students.
Many students found the math section to be the most challenging, while another student found the reading and writing sections to be “crazy.”
“I practiced all the Bluebook tests and SAT Suite questions, but the real ones were harder,” he wrote on a Facebook page for digital test preparation.
“YO [didn’t] “I have enough time to check my answers and read all the questions.”
Students now have two hours and 14 minutes for the test, replacing the previous three hours. Additionally, students can now expect their results in days instead of weeks.
The College Board claims to have made changes to the test design to reduce stress among students.
