(Lulu Devoulin/ Emerald)
In March 2024, College Board announced that moving forward all SATs will be taken completely digital in an in-person setting, which has begun this spring at test centers. The College Board stated that the change will allow test times to be shorter, more relevant, and easier to take and administer.
“I don’t know if moving to completely digital will make a huge difference,” said UO student James Miller. “I mean it’s still gonna be in person, so as long as the test proctors do good, then I think integrity will be kept for the SAT and it can still be a useful resource for colleges.”
In order to take the exam, students are required to download the Bluebook testing app. The app is run by College Board and includes a lockdown browser, a built-in timer and sets of tools needed to take the test.
The digital exam will take two hours and 14 minutes to complete compared to the three-hour and 15-minute time period for typical paper and pencil exams. The digital exam also consists of just two sections: a combined reading and writing portion and a single math section.
However, the integrity of online exams raised questions for UO student Zakary Christen-Cooney, due to the endless possibilities to cheat.
“I think they will have to make steps to make sure that there’s still integrity there because it would be easier to cheat, that just is what happens with online assessments,” Christen-Cooney said. “It could be seen as a score that’s less accurate because of the possible ways to cheat on it.”
Christen-Cooney also expressed his belief that the SAT is not a great measure of a student’s overall intelligence.
“I know a lot of super smart people who didn’t do well on the SAT because it’s kinda designed in a certain way for a certain time and I think it’s a little bit outdated,” Christen-Cooney said. “So I think that the move to test-optional for most schools is really important.”
Many schools across the nation moved towards test-optional applications for students during the pandemic — a system that the University of Oregon currently implements. In an email statement by Erin Hays, associate vice president for Student Services and Enrollment Management and director of admissions, she stated that “students who applied for fall 2021 [to UO] were the first to apply test optional.”
“If schools go test blind or test optional, I don’t think that should be determined off the SAT being digital necessarily,” Miller said. “I think mainly just admitting students based on who they are as people and judging that as a success factor more than the SAT test scores [is important].”
In her statement, Hays highlighted that holistic reviews help admission officers in their decisions. Holistic reviews consider factors such as grade trends, extracurricular involvement, special circumstances and more when determining student admissions.. Hays said that predicting success in college through curriculum and grades carries the most value in their admission decision.
Both Miller and Christen-Cooney do not believe the SAT should have a large effect on a student’s admission chances, but instead what a student can bring outside of the classroom.
“I think it’s looking at if they’re a well-rounded student, looking at club involvements, looking at stuff outside of school, reading their essays and seeing their stories and stuff like that, and also of course, their grade point average,” Christen-Cooney said.
Miller believes that the key to evaluating a student for admission begins with looking at who a student really is — placing less emphasis on one’s scores or statistics that could be skewed due to an individual’s poor test-taking abilities.
“Personally, I don’t feel like [the SAT] is the best indicator of a student’s readiness for college,” Miller said. “I would like to see more of a focus on an interview type of process for college admissions, just more focus being put on who students are as people rather than what numbers they can put up in terms of GPA or SAT scores.”
