The PSAT goes fully digital as of fall 2023

On October 25, Samo will be administering the PSATs digitally.

After 90 years of testing on paper,  the College Board has changed the PSATs to be taken online, marking a huge shift in standardized testing. Through this transition, the PSATs have undergone significant developments in the content, format and the general accessibility. All of these changes are aimed at creating testing that's friendlier for students and educators. 

The PSAT, also known as Preliminary SAT, is a 2-part, multiple-choice standardized test used for preparing students for their SAT. Testing is divided into a reading & writing section and a math section, students receive a total score between 320-1520. The PSATs are taken by around 3.6 million students ranging from grades 9-11. The PSAT is the only test that can qualify students for the National Merit Scholarship, a program that allows students to earn academic scholarships for university. Although PSATs are not considered in the college admission process, it is an incredibly helpful tool for students to get a sense of what SATs are like and identify what areas they need improvement in. 

Many major changes to PSATs can be found throughout this digital transformation. One of the most significant being the shortened duration of the test, digital PSATs are approximately 30 minutes shorter than traditional PSATs, as this new form of testing is adaptive to student responses. It tailors the difficulty of questions depending on how well a student is performing. The reading and writing sections have been reduced to only one instead of two sections, and is focusing on shorter passages containing only one question. One of the most convenient developments for students is the quicker score responses. Students can expect to receive their scores in a matter of days, instead of weeks. 

Changes of less significance are also apparent in this new formatting. There are many tools being made accessible for students to help guide them through their test-taking process. Students are now able to flag down questions to return to later, as well as a countdown clock that can alert them when they are running low on time. In math sections, built-in graphing calculators are made available, along with reference sheets composed of formulas. These seemingly smaller changes can have a strong impact on students, making testing more efficient. 

Given that this is the first year that digital PSATs are being implemented, there is some worry of the complications that could potentially arise and the unreliability of computers. When working digitally, issues with technology are always a possibility, if there are extensive issues with the PSATs, it will greatly impact students and staff nationwide. Some concerns that remain with digital testing could be network crashes, computer issues, and ensuring all students are prepared with their laptop or test-taking device. 

Samo’s principal, Marae Cruce shares the school's approach on preventing connection issues during testing. 

“We have tech support for every amount of rooms, for every floor and each zone that the PSAT is occurring in. […] We've checked our Wi Fi to make sure that it can reach all of the rooms,” Cruce said.  “It’s ramped up enough that there is enough bandwidth for everybody to have be on their devices. It can actually support everybody that's in there to be on two devices, at least. So, we know that we can support everybody being on at the same time.”