SAT goes digital

[Langue_doc]

No More No. 2 Pencils: The SAT Goes Fully Digital
The new format cuts nearly an hour out of the exam and has shorter reading passages.

The shorter reading passages are rather concerning--we already have students who think short stories are long novels.

[apl68]

My goodness, I don't recall the reading passages being all that long back in the 1980s!  I guess the tyranny of low expectations strikes again.

[mythbuster]

I thought the SAT went digital years a go. I remember all these reports about how it was adaptive, adjusting the questions based on what you got correct. This supposedly resulted in a shorter test with a more accurate score. Or was that just the GRE?

[ab_grp]

Thanks for sharing this, Langue_doc.  I was a little surprised to see that they are going completely digital given the logistical issues of delivering a high-stakes test digitally to so many.  They've been talking about moving toward digital (partially or fully) for years, but the adaptive part is newer (although it's just a two-stage format, which has pros and cons). 

Mythbuster, the GRE started into their various formats of adaptive testing in the 1990s, so it could be what you were thinking of.  The GRE was item-level adaptive early on and then also multistage but sounds like a different configuration than the SAT. 

As for the lengths of the reading passages, it does seem like a bad direction to be going in, unless we are planning to make reading material in college, business, and life outside of social media shorter as well.  It will interesting to read the validity studies looking at the relationship between scores on this new test and intended outcomes.  As far as face validity, it seems pretty poor.  However, I think they're probably right to some extent about test taker behavior on the longer passages (they hunt for the required info rather than actually reading anything).

[ciao_yall]

I thought the SAT went digital years a go. I remember all these reports about how it was adaptive, adjusting the questions based on what you got correct. This supposedly resulted in a shorter test with a more accurate score. Or was that just the GRE?

When I took the GRE ~ 15 years ago, that was how it went - adaptive on a computer. I went to a testing center.