The Preliminary SAT/National Merit Scholarship Qualifying (PSAT) test took place Oct. 11 for students in ninth to eleventh grade. This year marked the first official fully digital test which resulted in a significant technology slowdown.
The College Board stated in their released statement that the site was delayed due to “a surge in traffic on the application used by schools to set up and run [testing].” This caused many students to have a late start and not begin the exam until 9:15 a.m..
College Board recently changed their test from being on paper to digital, which caused a huge shift in practicing, as they only provided four practice SAT tests, and only one PSAT digital practice test, limiting the number of practice tests to five. Previous years, students had past PSATs to practice, in addition to many prep books.
The shift from paper to digital took some adjusting. “Although I had done practice tests, the new format was still a bit of an adjustment from having taken previous practice tests on paper,” junior Haleh Afshani said.
The paper PSAT had lengthier passages in the reading section, in addition to being a longer test in general. Previously, the paper PSAT had five passages with 47 questions, while the digital version provides a new passage for each of the 27 questions. The digital version combines reading and writing, and provides a graphing calculator for both math sections.
The digital version is also adaptive, as the “questions you’re given in the second module depend on how you performed on the first module,” per the College Board. Some students expressed added stress due to the adaptive nature: “During the test, worrying about whether or not the next section would be more challenging or easier was definitely a common stressor among my friends and me,” sophomore Alfred Jino said.
