The New Digital SAT vs. ACT
by Brooks Imel
Last October, many American high school students got their first taste of a “digital adaptive test” when they took the PSAT in its new, digital format. And as of March, 2024, the SAT has moved to a completely digital format–a decisive change for a test that’s been around for almost a century. The College Board has been working on this move for some time, announcing back in early 2022 that a fully-digital SAT was in the works. The new test can be taken on laptops or tablets in an app called “Blue Book,” a secure testing app developed by the College Board (the app “locks” a tester’s device during the exam). Students can take the exam on a laptop, iPad, or school-owned Chromebook. Read more to learn all about the new digital SAT and how it compares to the ACT.
How the Digital SAT Works
Some current digital exams–such as the GMAT–are item-adaptive, meaning that each test question is determined by performance on the previous question. In an item-adaptive test, the questions are constantly changing based upon student performance. The new Digital SAT is stage-adaptive, rather than item-adaptive. This provides students with the benefit of being able to go back to questions within the same stage before the test “adapts” based upon their performance in that stage.
The new exam combines the old Reading and Writing sections into a single section, so now there are only two sections: Math, and Reading/Writing. Each section is broken down into two stages:
Reading/Writing: 2 stages of 27 questions (32 minutes each)
Math: 2 stages of 22 questions (35 minutes each)
After the initial stage of each section, the test will adapt based upon a student’s performance in the first stage. Those with a higher performance in stage 1 will receive a more difficult stage 2; those with lower performance in stage 1 will receive a different version of stage 2 that contains fewer difficult questions and more easy questions. The adaptive nature of the test allows the College Board to zero in on an accurate score for a student in a shorter test, at only 2 hours and 14 minutes (the old SAT took three hours!).
Like the old SAT, scores are still out of 1600, so they can be interpreted in the same way, and compared with older scores. For this reason, it’s likely that most colleges that already superscore will have no problem superscoring digital SAT scores with past paper-based SAT scores.
In addition to being shorter, the digital format provides better test security as well as more fairness in administration. On the Digital SAT, all students will take the exam in the same order (Reading/Writing, followed by Math), but the digital format allows for the College Board to easily give students different versions of each section by selecting different questions from a large pool of test items that have been matched for difficulty level. Furthermore, fairness in terms of timing is now out of the hands of proctors: when the time is up, the digital exam will lock down and end (i.e., no more “pencils down!”).
On the Digital SAT, calculators are now permitted for the entire Math section, as opposed to only on a specific sub-section (as in the old SAT). Furthermore, the Blue Book App has a calculator tool included, so that all students will have access to a calculator, no matter what.
ACT vs. Digital SAT
Students who would prefer a paper & pencil test are out of luck, when it comes to the SAT. The ACT, on the other hand, is still mostly a paper-based exam, although the testing company is in the process of piloting a digital version. The digital ACT first became available in December 2023 - and only as a pilot to about 5,000 students. The ACT has announced that it’ll be offering the online test at very select locations nationwide this year - so it may be a while until you are offered this opportunity in your local area.
Besides the digital versus paper format, one of the biggest differences between the two exams is the fact that the SAT is adaptive and the ACT is not. On the ACT, question difficulty is random in the English and Reading sections, and in the Math and Science sections, difficulty increases in a linear fashion, from beginning to end. The other big difference is timing: the Digital SAT is much shorter than the ACT:
Digital SAT Length: 2 hours, 14 minutes
ACT Length: 2 hours, 55 minutes
The ACT still has 4 sections: English, Math, Reading, and Science (plus an optional Writing section). Each section is scored out of 36, and a student’s composite score is an average of the four sections. All sections on the ACT are multiple choice (4 options for English, Reading, and Science; 5 for Math). As mentioned above, the Digital SAT only has two sections: Reading/Writing and Math. In the Reading/Writing section, all questions are multiple choice (with 4 answer choices). The Math section contains a mixture of multiple-choice questions (also with 4 answer choices) and student-produced responses. On the Digital SAT, the student-produced responses are mixed in randomly throughout the Math section, whereas on the old paper exam, there was a stand-alone section for student-produced responses.
Some students may feel more comfortable taking an exam in paper-and-pencil format, which may push them toward the ACT. But the vastly shorter Digital SAT is likely to be very attractive to many test-takers! Either way, we highly recommend that you take full-length diagnostic tests for both exams to compare performance–then, prepare for and take the test that better reflects your true abilities (i.e., the one you can perform better on!).