MILLERSVILLE, Pa. — Taking the SAT will no longer require students to bring a No. 2 pencil and Scantron. Instead, students will be required to bring a computer to take the standardized exam online.
“Students are digital natives," said Rob Franek, the editor-in-chief at the Princeton Review. "They are simply more comfortable on a digital app taking this exam than they ever will be in a pencil and paper format.”
Starting March 9, all high school students will be taking the new SAT online. The exam will be around 45 minutes shorter than the old pencil and paper test, and the results will come back a lot faster.
The exam will also have adaptive prompts, meaning students will be given easier or harder questions depending on how they do at the start of the test.
Franek said that the exam is designed to be more accessible to students.
“It’s in a platform that they would prefer, the question types aren’t changing dramatically, and they have more time they’ll take back for themselves, less time they’ll spend in testing fatigue," said Franek.
For hundreds of schools across the country, like Millersville University, the new exam won't change its enrollment process. According to FairTest, more than 80% of colleges and universities won't require their Fall 2025 applicants to submit their SAT scores.
“Standardized tests are a nice shorthand if you have a huge volume of applicants to go through, and they’re all similar," said Douglas Zander, the associate vice president of enrollment management at Millersville University. "But I think it’s important for us as professional educators that we’re looking more deeply at a student’s performance beyond a test that happens on a particular day.”
Franek said despite the SAT's flaws, the test designers at College Board are moving the exam in the right direction.
“I think bringing the SAT up to the 21st century is well-played," said Franek.