EVERYTHING You Need to Know for the Digital SAT

[Music] thank you the SAT is about to change forever in 2024 it will be going from a paper and pencil test to a digital adaptive test and in this video I'm going to tell you everything you need to know about this new test so you can get the score that you want to get so first things first just because it's digital does not mean you can take it at home that would be stupid you still have to go into a testing center to take the test however the test is getting shorter it's going all the way from three hours down to two hours and 14 minutes which is great the reading and writing sections have been combined into the aptly named reading and writing section they're just so creative at college board and the two math sections have been combined into a single math section where you have a Desmos calculator on hand the entire time and that is a complete Game Changer but we'll get into that in a bit each section is divided into two modules each reading and writing module is 27 questions in 32 minutes so 71 seconds a question and each math module is 22 questions in 35 minutes so 95 seconds per question this is more time per question than you get on the paper for SAT but here's what's important the first module of each section is going to be a range of questions that everybody gets they're going to be in the randomized order so it's harder to cheat but everyone will get the same set of questions on the first module then the second module will be designed based on how well you did in the first module so if you did well in the first module the second module will be harder if you did poorly on the first module the second will be easier and this has a couple of implications first it means you'll kind of know how well you did on the first module by the time you get to the second right like if you get to the second module and your first question is what is 20 of 100 now is the time to panic because you probably bond that first module and the other question is how is this supposed to be scored because some students are getting harder problems than other students now of course College boards extremely vague on how they're actually going to score this test so I took it upon myself to get the software that the digital sat uses and run some experiments the first thing I did was butcher the reading and writing section because I simply don't care about it then I took the math section just as I would as an SAT Math to their free tutoring at learnsctmath. com by the way I got a perfect score on the first module but then I got two problems wrong on the second module despite that though I still ended with an 800 on the test I wanted to see what the cutoff was for a perfect score so I took the test again this time missing three questions and I got a 780 so you have to get a perfect score on module one and then you can afford to miss about two questions on module two but generally speaking you don't need to get every single question correct to get a perfect score also note that this doesn't work the other way around I tried the reading and writing section missing two problems on the first module and getting a perfect on the second and I got a 760 from that so you have to get a perfect on module one so clearly you're penalized more for missing easy problems than hard problems which makes sense but I wanted to see exactly what extent this is true so like any normal person would do I took the test two more times the first time I got everything wrong on module one and a perfect score on the easiest possible module two it was very easy trust me the second time I took the test I did the opposite thing I got a perfect score on module one and then got everything wrong on the very hard module too now let's play a game what do you think my score was for each of these tests place your bets now [Music] okay Moment of Truth the score for test a was a 4 10. God and the score for test B was a 560.

that is a big difference remember both of these tests got the same number of problems right it just depends which module the big takeaway from these experiments is that module one can and will completely screw over your SAT score it's only 22 questions and yet it is setting a hard floor or ceiling on the rest of your test so now let's talk about content changes on the digital sat the biggest change of all on the reading and the writing and the math is that the test is going away from long passages and word problems and transitioning to short isolated questions this is most impactful in the reading section because the 85 line passages are completely gone and are replaced with shorter paragraphs and sentences that you have to fill in the blanks for it's still a lot of the same skills sentence completion identifying purpose analyzing data grammar structuring sentences however for now you're missing the questions that would only make sense with longer passages like questions about characters or those two-part questions where you use the evidence and one question to support the answer of the previous one now because I'm an SAT math tutor that's pretty much all I can speak to about the reading section and how it's changing but I do have some strong thoughts about the math section so let's get into that on the math section the questions are pretty much the same as they were before the only piece of content that's actually getting removed is imaginary numbers and good riddance I say why were those on the test in the first place the other change is just like how in the reading and writing the problems are getting shorter and more concise so are the word problems on the math sat word problems are also making up a smaller proportion of questions on the test the new breakdown is 35 algebra 35 advanced math that's systems of equations quadratics exponentials rationals Etc 15 problem solving and data analysis that's your word problems and 15 geometry and trig and by the way trig does not mean unit circle and polar coordinates it's Pythagorean theorem socato the stuff you probably learned in Geometry okay here's the really big change you get a Desmos calculator for the entire test for those of you that haven't used Desmos you can go to desmos. com calculator and play around with it because that is literally what you will get on the digital sat it can do arithmetic yes but it is also a straight up graphing calculator let me show you why this is crazy take systems of equations for example this is something that will literally show up on every sat previously you would need to solve these problems by hand using substitution or more commonly elimination with Desmos however you just type in both equations and the point of intersection is your solution to the system you can even solve regular algebra problems like this just graph each side of the equation and then the point of intersection is your solution if you get a function that has a mystery constant that you need to solve for you can plug in that equation into Desmos and then use the slider to guess and check different values for that mystery constant in fact you can graph pretty much everything x and y intercepts graph it number of solutions graphite points if section graph it minimum value graph it but wait there's one other thing that's really funny if you need to calculate the mean or median simply type in the word mean input your data and then Desmos will automatically calculate it for you and I bet 99 of people are going to take the test without actually knowing that's a feature so be glad you're watching this video and you're in the one percent I'd estimate that about 25 of problems on this test should be solved with Desmos and about half of them can be if you really wanted to you're still allowed to bring your own calculator but don't even bother Desmos is better in every way another change that's pretty insignificant but I still feel like I should mention is that the free response questions no longer limit you to four boxes because that would be stupid and last but not least the whole reason this test is going digital is so that college board does not need to collect 1. 7 million test booklets before they can get you back your score the second you hit the submit button collegeboard knows your score and college board takes pride in this achievement they're saying you will get your score back in days instead of weeks but why is it still taking days to send you the score let's count regulated instantly David what could possibly be the reason for this anyways if you found this video helpful be sure to subscribe I'm currently exclusively making content on the SAT Math so if you subscribe to this channel you will get all the information that you need to completely obliterate this sat and if you're interested in private tutoring head over to learnsatmath.