By Aren Framil, Co-News Editor
On Oct. 11, hundreds of Conestoga freshmen, sophomores and juniors will take the Preliminary SAT (PSAT), a standardized test administered annually by the College Board. However, this year’s test-takers will face an entirely new, digitally adaptive format which will make the exam shorter, more secure and less stressful for examinees, according to the College Board.
The changes in format go beyond simply transferring the test to a digital medium. Before test day, students will download the program Bluebook on their computers, which prevents the use of other browsers while taking an exam. The digital test will take around two hours and 15 minutes, as opposed to the three hours required for the paper version. Additionally, the College Board combined the reading and writing sections and eliminated the no-calculator math portion.
The test will be in a “stage adaptive” format, which will be in the form of modules. Matty Steiner, Senior Director of Outreach at Compass Education Group, presented the standardized testing changes to parents during the Sophomore Springboard program as part of the group’s partnership with Conestoga. Steiner believes that the implementation of an adaptive format is meant to make test-taking an easier, more manageable experience for students.
“The (digital) PSAT and SAT are ‘stage adaptive’ exams,” Steiner said. “That essentially means that everyone takes a section of critical reading and writing questions and one section of math questions, and based on your pattern of correct and incorrect answer choices, (the test) sends you to an easier or harder module.”
The exam program will pull from a database of thousands of potential questions, giving each test-taker a unique set of test items. No two tests will be the same, which the College Board hopes will reduce the risk of cheating. However, this method of selecting questions means that the College Board will not release any answers or analysis of the test material, something it has provided for the previous paper tests.
In October 2022, then- Conestoga freshmen took a digital PSAT, while then-sophomores and juniors took the regular paper test. Unlike the digital adaptive test, the online PSAT simply contained the questions on the paper PSAT transposed to a digital medium. Sonal Shah, a current sophomore who took the digital PSAT last fall, believes the digital method of test-taking offers some advantages over the conventional format.
“With paper tests, you spend time going back and forth (between pages),” Shah said. “But, for (the digital test), you don’t have to keep on going back and forth. When you get to a question you can scroll up and down, and it’s much easier to find the information.”
Aren Framil can be reached at [email protected].
