HILLSBOROUGH COUNTY, Fla. — The move to make the SAT exam digital has been a long time in the making.
“The change has really been happening over the past year,” said Brian Hoover, Supervisor in Accelerated Programs for Hillsborough County Public Schools.
Hillsborough County and Pinellas County have been going through the transition.
Both districts just launched the new testing format for the SAT this spring.
“It was a good change overall, it’s just working out those initial hiccups along the way,” said Cassandra Bogatz, Director of Advanced Studies and Academic Excellence at Pinellas County Schools.
“For the students, they're using technology that they’re used to using,” said Hoover.
Logistically how students take the exam varies. They can take it on school computers, or their personal computers depending on the situation.
“In Hillsborough County, our IT department has been a great partner in this. So they’ve actually managed to install the Blue Book App, which is the app that the students take the test on, on all of our district devices. So for Saturday assessments, students do have the opportunity to bring their own device if they’d like, depending on the test center that they’re testing,” said Hoover.
“For us, for school day assessments, this change does provide us with more flexibility. Before, it was a one-day assessment in the fall, one-day assessment in the spring. Now we’re given windows of time to test students. So we had about seven weeks in the spring to do school day SAT,” he added.
There’s also an effort to work around some barriers that come with a digital assessment.
“If the proctor determines the student needs a computer, SAT is sending those computers to the test site to make it accessible for their students,” said Bogatz.
“For our students with accommodations, they have their time and a half and their double time built right into their test,” she added.
Not only is the exam no longer the traditional paper and pencil format, but it’s now shorter—just two hours and 14 minutes compared to three hours.
“That’s 64 minutes for the reading and writing section and 70 minutes for the math section,” said Bogatz.
The test now also comes with some user-friendly tools.
“For the reading and writing section, they can actually annotate the texts. So if they are highlighting key ideas or things that may help them answer the questions later on,” said Bogatz.
There’s a built-in calculator for the math section, too, if students want to use it.
One of the biggest changes is the exam is split into modules because it's now adaptive, meaning, the better the student does, the harder questions get.
“How the student does on the first module determines what type of questions they get on the second module. So they should get a more customized testing experience,” said Hoover.
In Pinellas, teachers have been working to provide boot camps for students to prepare them for the shift.
“A lot of our teachers are studying every little change that’s been made,” said Bogatz.
School officials said the transition has been going well, and for the most part the test now being digital works in students’ favor.
“The feedback that we’ve gotten from our proctors is that the students are just much more engaged, and they are much more at ease, and that’s a positive thing for sure moving forward because it just helps with our scores when students have that positive testing environment,” said Bogatz.
“Our testing coordinators are appreciative of not being shipped 500 test booklets that they have to organize, and answers sheets that they have to bubble in. Some of those just use valuable class time and valuable school and student and work time,” she added.
Education leaders predict the ACT exam and Advanced Placement exams will eventually become digital too.
