The SAT Just Got a Little Less Miserable — act update

The College Board, the nonprofit that has spent nearly a century convincing American teenagers that their futures hinge on a Saturday morning in a high school cafeteria, announced this week that the SAT is going fully digital and—wait for it—shorter. Starting in 2024, students will take the test on a laptop, the exam will shrink from three hours to about two, and the notorious reading passages will be reduced to bite-sized chunks. Cue the applause. Cue the skeptical eyebrow raise. Let's be clear about what's actually happening here. The College Board isn't having a sudden crisis of conscience about the toll its product takes on anxious sixteen-year-olds. It's responding to market forces. The University of California system—the single biggest customer in the country—dropped the SAT entirely. Hundreds of other schools followed. Pandemic-era test-optional policies, originally temporary, turned out to be popular, and a lot of admissions offices discovered they didn't miss the tests at all. The College Board needed a headline that made its flagship product feel modern instead of mandatory. So we get a digital test. Adaptive, meaning it adjusts difficulty based on your answers. Shorter, meaning less endurance and more efficiency. Proctored at a testing center or, in some cases, at school. All of which sounds like progress, and some of it probably is. A two-hour test is genuinely less grueling than a three-hour one. Digital delivery means faster scores. Students who can't afford tutors may find adaptive questions less punishing than a fixed gauntlet of trick wording. But here's the part nobody puts in the press release. A shorter, adaptive test is also harder to prepare for with brute-force drilling, which sounds egalitarian until you remember who buys the expensive adaptive practice software. The College Board sells its own prep materials, and its partnership with Khan Academy is generous but not infinite. The kids with private tutors and $200/hour consultants will adapt faster than the kids whose schools barely have working Wi-Fi. And notice what hasn't changed: the SAT still exists, still costs money, still gets marketed to families as a golden ticket. The digital format is a facelift, not a cure. The underlying anxiety economy—test prep books, boot camps, the whole cottage industry of turning childhood into a résumé—remains fully intact. The real question isn't whether the new SAT is better. It's whether colleges should keep requiring any standardized test at all, given that high school GPA predicts college success just as well, if not better, and doesn't come with a registration fee. The College Board is betting that a sleeker product will keep it relevant. That's a business decision dressed up as a student-friendly reform. So enjoy the shorter test, Class of 2024. Just don't mistake convenience for fairness. The company that made billions selling anxiety to teenagers has simply found a new way to sell it—this time with a progress bar.