According to students, the March 9, 2024 digital SAT exam was incredibly difficult. Find out why and how you can better prepare.
The first ever Digital SAT exam in the US proved to be an extremely rude awakening for hundreds of thousands of students who took it on March 9, 2024.
Rather than a seamless evolution to a more modern format as promised, an overwhelming number of test-takers reported feeling blindsided by the virtual exam's vastly increased difficulty compared to the practice materials they had studied.
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Overall Sentiment
While a few outliers reported having a relatively straightforward exam experience more aligned with studying, the overwhelming consensus was that an extremely generous scoring curve would be needed for most students to obtain anything close to their practice test levels and target scores.
On the Reddit forum r/SAT, distraught students voiced their frustration and shock in the hours after completing the first-ever Digital SAT in America.
"They need to provide a massive curve so it doesn't screw so many students over," one pleaded. "I studied so hard and it amounted to nothing and now my dad's disappointed in me," another dejectedly shared.
Throughout the 2,500+ comments, students powerlessly vented their months of intense preparation being severely undermined on test day. "I got cooked by math, and "I'm in shock rn" were just a few of the dismayed reactions expressed.
While the College Board has stated the digital format allows for enhanced scoring equalization across test forms, this first run has left students deeply shaken in their confidence about what their score reports will look like. As one user remarked, "collegeboard needs to realize the large gap in difficulty between the bluebook tests and the actual tests."
Difficult Math Questions
Indeed, students described scrambling from beginning to end on the test day, especially with difficult math questions on the hard second module.
"I got 1600 on my last practice but the actual exam HUMBLED me...specifically math module 2," one student lamented. Another echoed, "Practice test scores ranged from 1540-1600 for me. I'll be surprised if I even get a 1400 on this Digital SAT."
"Module 2 wiped the floor with me," a student admitted about the math section's nightmarish latter stages. "The questions looked simple at first glance but required very clever insights and creative application of concepts we hadn't prepared for."
To be fair, these are initial reactions to the exam, and these students won't receive their score for at least a week, so their actual results are yet to be determined.
Difficult Reading And Writing Questions
The Reading and Writing section was not much easier. Complaints varied from vocabulary questions being too difficult to too much science-specific materials in the passages.
"I almost ran out of time on the reading second module - I had like 5 minutes left for 10 questions. I felt like I was reading a PhD lab report," a student complained. Numerous students reported encountering an onslaught of vocabulary terms and question types they had never seen before in their studying.
"There were so many scientific analyses and 'what agrees with the hypothesis' questions. Felt like something right outta ACT science," one remarked. Another student described "an actual massacre" on Module 2, lamenting "It's just so unrepresentative of the questions they provide on their practice tests."
Our own students on the Test Ninjas platforms and the tutors we work with echoed the same thing: the reading questions, specifically vocabulary questions, were tough, and the official practice materials were not sufficient.
How You Can Better Prepare For The Next Exam
While College Board provides free official SAT prep through their Bluebook App and their official partner Khan Academy, many students who used that resource were critically underprepared for just how challenging the inaugural Digital SAT proved to be. Practice materials from both sources were a lot less difficult than the real exam.
To better prepare for upcoming exams, we recommend students only use practice the difficult-rated questions from official practice materials. We also recommend joining online or in-person study groups with similar-level peers - from the students we surveyed we found that students who studied with peers outperformed students who studied alone. If a group is not available, joining online communities such as r/SAT can be helpful too.
Finally, there's Test Ninjas, our own digital SAT practice platform. Our platform provides plenty of difficult questions in both Reading and Writing and Math, and our mock tests are fully adaptive with highly-difficult second modules just like the real exam.
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