One of the preliminary ideas that many students quickly realize about the SAT is that it’s as much a test of time management as it is of subject knowledge. In an effort to cater to high school students across the country, the SAT aims to test skills and materials encountered in their high school classrooms. Furthermore, to create a large range of scores, it is tested on a strict time constraint. However, the new 2024 SAT, in addition to transitioning from a paper-and-pencil to digital format, has also rethought these strict timing constraints – a characteristic of the exam since its debut.
In the age of technological advancement, the College Board’s transition to a digitally administered SAT keeps the test relevant for students and more straightforward for administrators. Propelled by the pandemic, the shift takes into consideration the quarantine-induced increase in digital learning and testing. Similarly, the test’s increase in allotted time considers the changing idea of what it means to be “smart”. In the College Board’s experimentation of the new SAT format, they found that “on average, 97 percent of students completed all questions in a section with up to 7 minutes to spare on each section.” This outcome thus removes much of the test’s time pressure, allowing students more freedom to work carefully, double-check their work, and rethink their answers. But, in addition to increasing the amount of time allotted per question, the new SAT has also considerably decreased the total amount of time the exam takes from approximately 3 hours in 2023 to around 2 hours in 2024. This leads to students being more focused during the entire duration of the test and feeling less drained after it is taken.
However, the simultaneous increase and decrease in timing is thus also accompanied by a full restructuring of the test. The current version of the SAT features 4 sections: a 65-minute Reading section with 52 questions (section 1), a 35-minute Writing & Language section with 44 questions (section 2), a 25-minute No-Calculator Math section with 20 questions (section 3), and a 55 minutes Calculator Math section with 38 questions (section 4). However, in the Reading & Writing section of the new SAT, the time will be split evenly between two modules – each taking 32 minutes and consisting of 27 questions. Additionally, in contrast to the current SAT, each passage will be much shorter and only consist of one question. In the Math section of the new SAT, each module will take 35 minutes and have 22 questions. Students will also be allowed to use a calculator for the entirety of the math sections. Finally, the new digital SAT will be adaptive, meaning that the difficulty level of the second module will be based on the number of questions a student answered correctly in the first module.
Although these changes in the test’s timing and structure may cause students to feel ill-prepared for how to approach this crucial part of their college applications, the changes in the SAT have been created to better line up with the skills students will be required to use in college. It is, after all, a test to assess college readiness. As our understanding of higher education continues to grow and change, it only makes sense that the SAT will evolve along with it.
Published in the October 2024 issue of the Whitney Young Beacon.
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