For junior Grant Mu, getting a good score on the SAT was a top priority for him. Since it was his first time taking the SAT this fall, he said he was already feeling stressed; however, he said the digital format made the whole experience much more difficult and stressful.

“This was my first time taking the SAT, and it was a lot tougher than I thought it would be. The way the online SAT is set up just puts more pressure on me,” Mu said.

The College Board officially released the digital SAT in March of 2024, replacing the standard paper version that students had taken for decades. Along with the new SAT format, the College Board also changed the structure of the SAT, making it shorter in length and implementing an adaptive format. The adaptive format takes how the students perform on the first section and bases the second section’s difficulty accordingly. 

The College Board said that the shift to digital testing provided an overall more streamlined testing experience for students. Although like many other students, Mu said the changes only made the test harder, contradicting the College Board’s claims. 

Senior Mukund Sagi, who has taken both the paper PSAT and the digital SAT, said he agreed. He further said the biggest challenge with the new format is in the math section.

“On paper, I could just draw on the booklet for geometry questions, but with the digital SAT, I have to write out every single figure by myself,” Sagi said.

Sagi mentioned another challenge of the digital SAT: the smaller number of questions actually increases the pressure.

“Since there are fewer questions on the test, there is way less room for error, and every mistake feels like it matters more,” Sagi said.

Mu shared a similar concern, but focused on the adaptive part itself. 

“The adaptive part makes me feel like if I miss a single question, I’ll be pushed into the easier second section, and it really makes the whole process more stressful,” Mu said.

Melinda Stephan, College & Career Programming Coordinator at Carmel High School, said the adaptive structure may cause students to overthink during the test.

“If students understand that it is adaptive, then they might focus too much on when the questions change in difficulty instead of just doing their best,” Stephan said.

According to a study conducted by the American Institutes for Research (AIR), students who transitioned to online testing did significantly worse than their peers who took the same test on paper. 

The study does mention that in the second year of online testing, the performance gap shrank as students started adapting to the new format and improving their scores. But the shift to online testing negatively affected students like Mu, who is part of one of the first U.S. classes to take the digital SAT.

“I do think the more familiarity with the format, the more confident students become over time at a minimum,” Stephan said. 

Despite this, she emphasized that other factors like test prep and curriculum exposure still play major roles in performance.

Mu said, “Even though students will probably get used to the digital SAT eventually, that doesn’t help me right now. The stakes are still just as high, and I need to get just as high a score as students in previous years, even though the new format makes it much harder to get there.”