Fully digital SAT’s new ‘adaptive’ sections dumb down college admissions test

Pencils down, power on.

Students taking the SAT this week will see some hi-tech changes as the college admissions exam goes fully digital and adopts an “adaptive” testing method — meaning the difficulty of questions they face will change depending on how they performed in prior parts of the assessment.

“Each test section (Reading and Writing, and Math) is divided into two equal-length, separately timed parts called modules,” according to the College Board, which creates and administers the SAT.

“You’ll answer a set of questions in the first module before moving on to the next. The questions you’re given in the second module depend on how you performed on the first module.”

The first module “consists of a broad mix of easy, medium and hard questions across a range of domains. The second will feature “on average, either of higher difficulty or of lower difficulty than that in the first module,” the organization explained.

Students who are given easier questions in the second portion of the SAT “won’t be disadvantaged,” the College Board insists.

“You’ll be presented with questions tailored for your abilities. You won’t be presented with questions that are much too hard or much too easy,” it said according to its website.

“You can be confident that you’re going to end up with an accurate score. Your score will reflect your achievement and skills based on your answers to questions in both modules.”

However, the organization does not explain whether students who receive harder questions in the back half of the sections will be penalized if they answer wrong. The org also didn’t explain how the SAT remains standardized while varying questions among test-takers.

“No matter which module you’re routed to, the most important thing to keep in mind is to do your best,” the College Board said on its site. “Your score will be accurate, and you won’t get a lower score just because you saw a lower difficulty set of questions.”

The Post has reached out to the College Board for comment about the changes, which are slated to roll out Saturday.

Students are still required to take the SAT in person. They can use their own laptops or tablets, borrow a device from their school or make a prior arrangement to use a loaner from the College Board.

Scores will be calculated for the entire section based on both modules, and the full SAT will still be on a 1600-point scale.

The adaptive testing change also drops the test’s duration to two hours from three — and students will get their results within days instead of weeks.

The changes to the SAT come as elite schools — such as Ivy Leagues Brown University, Yale University and Dartmouth College — are now walking back to being test-optional, which became popular during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Dartmouth was the first school to reverse its decision on Feb. 5

Yale announced its reversal on Feb. 22, saying it will now require first-year and transfer students to submit either SAT, ACT, AP or IB exam scores in their application.

“For students attending high schools with fewer resources, applications without scores can inadvertently leave admissions officers with scant evidence of their readiness for Yale,” Dean of Undergraduate Jeremiah Quinlan said.

“When students attending these high schools include a score with their application — even a score below Yale’s median range — they give the committee greater confidence that they are likely to achieve academic success in college.”

Brown announced Tuesday that it would follow suit, stating similarly to Yale that without them, it’s hard for admissions to determine if students will thrive at the school.

However, Brown Provost Francis J. Doyle III insisted that those admitted during the test-optional period are not struggling compared to their peers.