We are excited about the ‘new’ SAT. When the SAT changed in March 2016, it was a better and more relevant version of the earlier bulky vocabulary -intensive SAT. If that is an experience to judge by, the Digital SAT (DSAT) is, in all probability, going to give the SAT a fresh lease of life. As a robust training center engaged in training for the ACT, AP and SAT for many years, Option loves challenges and invariably is ready well in advance to face them. Our active engagement with students writing the erstwhile SAT version since 2016 has afforded us opportunities to gauge not only test takers but also the test: year after year and test after test, we trained students – some succumbed, some struggled, some survived, and many excelled despite the challenges and idiosyncrasies of the test.
This obviously allowed us to identify the pros and cons as well as the deficiencies of the test. By end 2019, it was almost certain that the test was assuming an aggressive posture and was nowhere as simple as many prep materials made it out to be. In particular, the READING SECTION was the gordian knot of the exercise and proved fatal even for many academically sound students because of the sheer length of the passages, the excess of the questions on each passage and the obvious paucity of time – a recipe for disaster and that too at the start of the test!!!!! Another disconcerting aspect of the earlier SAT was the inclusion of calculator and non-calculator MATH SECTIONS.
