Beginning next year, students will use a computer to take the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) in a controlled setting, either in school or at a testing center with a proctor present. Students taking the test at international centers will make the switch in 2023. The changes will take effect in the U.S. in 2024.

The College Board conducted a pilot of the digital test in 2021; 80 percent of the students who took the digital test said that they found it less stressful than taking the traditional pencil-and-paper version.

The test will be shorter, the College Board said, with a two-hour timeframe replacing the existing three-hour period, and calculators will be allowed for the entirety of the math section. One of the ways that the exam creators have shortened the exam is to cut the length of reading passages. The maximum score will continue to be 1600, and the multiple choice questions will be administered using adaptive testing, so that all students will not see the same sequence of questions.

Students can use their own devices to take the test. Schools and test centers will provide a device for students who don't have their own.

The switch to digital will make score reporting faster, the College Board said, with scores expected to be returned in a matter of days, instead of the usual weekslong wait.

Especially during the coronavirus pandemic, most U.S. colleges and universities (including the voluminous California public system) removed the requirement for applicants to submit scores from an SAT or an ACT test. Possibly not coincidentally, the number of students taking the SAT dropped, from 2.2 million in 2020 to 1.5 million in 2021. However, the College Board said that the current number was slightly higher, with nearly 1.7 million students in the class of 2022 already having taken the SAT test.

One other prestigious university, Harvard, has announced that will not require SAT or ACT results for at least the next four years.

The College Board, the New York-based nonprofit that oversees the SAT, has made various changes in the past few years:

• In 2021, the College Board said that it would eliminate the SAT's subject tests and jettison the essay writing section, which had been made optional in 2016.
• In 2018, the Board introduced the Adversity Score, designed to encapsulate a college or university applicant's economic hardship. After a one-year beta test involving 50 schools, the Board decided not to include the score.
• The College Board in 2016 eliminated both the vocabulary section and the essay writing section as requirements. Those changes built on similar ones made in 2014.