Greetings wonderful Westchester Prep families, and welcome to the second edition of our blog! In this post, we dive into a retrospective on the Digital SAT two years after its release.
Greetings wonderful Westchester Prep families, and welcome to the second edition of our blog! In this post, we dive into a retrospective on the Digital SAT two years after its release. With the launch of the new Enhanced ACT currently underway, this overview of the rollout of the Digital SAT will help students and parents inform their expectations for both SAT and ACT prep in 2026. We start with a timeline of official material releases and meaningful dates, then outline some pros and cons of the Digital SAT before closing with some thoughts on the Enhanced ACT.
A few months ahead of their first official Digital SAT in March 2024 and the simultaneous extinction of the previous version of the SAT, College Board released a batch of official material that would serve as students’ first look at the new exam. The material came in the form of four official practice tests on College Board’s Bluebook App, four “linear” paper test PDFs, and an online question bank.
In my theoretical gradebook, College Board receives an A- for content quality and a C for organization. There were a significant number of repeated questions among the three versions of the content release with no easy way to tell which ones were repeated, but the amount of new material was useful and appreciated.
The four Bluebook Practice Tests were the stars of the show: they provided opportunities for students to take a full exam with the exact format of the new Digital SAT. Like the official exam, these tests were adaptive, meaning that for both the Reading and Writing and Math portions, students were sent to either an easier (lower) or harder (upper) second module depending on how they performed in the first module. To this day, Bluebook Practice Tests are the best approximation of what a student will see on test day.
According to College Board, the linear tests were released primarily for students who have an accommodation that allows them to continue to take the SAT on paper. While they are essential for those students, given the overlap in question makeup with the Bluebook Practice Tests, the linear tests fill a more niche role in the preparatory process.
Once we parsed the online question bank, removing the questions that overlapped with Bluebook exams and organizing the bank into a usable format, we were able to put together a solid initial package of official preparatory material.
March certainly came in like a lion in 2024: many students reported that the test was much harder than any of the Bluebook Practice Tests, especially the math section. While this speculation was only anecdotal, the subsequent release of two new Bluebook Practice Tests (Practice Test 5 and Practice Test 6) buttressed the idea that the Digital SAT was going to be slightly more difficult than the original practice material had indicated: both tests appeared to be a small step up from the previously released practice tests; certain question types— e.g. the Rhetorical Synthesis questions on the Reading and Writing section— had clearly been buffed up.
In October 2024, without announcing they were doing so, College Board added over 500 questions to their online bank. None of these questions were necessarily more difficult than previously released questions, but we addressed some new wrinkles that popped in our prep work.
In February 2025, just before the March exam of that year, College Board released Practice Tests 7, 8, 9, and 10, while simultaneously removing Practice Tests 1, 2, and 3 from the Bluebook app. They announced that Practice Tests 8-10 were revamped versions of Practice Tests 1-3 (some questions were kept; some were replaced by questions more characteristic of the current version). Practice Test 7 was entirely new.
This drop all but confirmed that the suspicions of the March 2024 students were correct: the first three practice tests were indeed no longer representative of the official Digital SAT (and perhaps never were). The ones that took their place— tests 8, 9, and 10— were more challenging and nuanced in select areas.
As they did in October 2024, College Board released another batch of questions in their online question bank in August 2025. Again, new wrinkles in certain question types were important for students to consider heading into the fall 2025 exams.
On the Reading and Writing side, Rhetorical Synthesis questions seemed to experience another bump in difficulty. On the Math side, College Board seemed to reinforce their focus on function notation in the Advanced Math and Algebra categories. They also snuck in a trigonometry question that hinged on a student’s understanding of the unit circle, which was previously untested.
Pros:
Cons:
If the Digital SAT is any indication, the early stages of the Enhanced ACT rollout will be accompanied by uncertainty— especially in the first few official exams— as ACT works out the kinks of the new test. Whether a student should take the Enhanced ACT or Digital SAT is an individualized decision— one that we are happy to guide you or your child through as we always have.
I’ll close with a classic quote from my basketball coaching days that imparts wisdom applicable to any endeavor— be it academic, athletic, or personal.
“Control what you can control.” —Andre Agassi (and many other people before him)
In basketball, there are a myriad of factors in each game that are outside of our control: how well our teammates play, how well our opponents shoot, how fairly the refs call the game, etc. Likewise, as evidenced by the Digital SAT’s two-year journey, there are countless things in the test prep process that are outside of our control, some of which are more fair than others. As a student, however frustrating it may be, the best thing you can do is prepare as well as you can for the test you expect to see. We will always be here to help you do just that.
Happy November!
~Haley
