In March 2025, we updated our SAT Digital practice test scoring methodology and increased the difficulty of our SAT full-length practice tests. These updates are in response to new Digital SAT practice tests College Board released on February 3, 2025, and our analysis of actual student results from the past academic year. Keep reading for detailed changes.
What Do We Know about the New Digital SAT Practice Tests 7-10?
Before we delve into the new, harder Digital SAT practice tests College Board released on February 3, 2025, let’s go back through the history of the released practice tests.
College Board first announced the new Digital SAT at the start of 2022, and released the original four practice tests in November of that year. These tests were the first look at the new Digital SAT, which domestic students started taking in March of 2024 (international students began taking the test the previous March).
These first four practice tests were the only ones available to students until March of 2024, when College Board released two additional tests, tests 5 and 6, on the Bluebook app. Before Feb. 3, 2025, no tests had ever been removed from the Bluebook app.
That means that this marks the most intensive change in available Digital SAT practice tests that has happened since the Digital SAT was announced.
What Do the Updated Bluebook SAT Tests Mean for Students?
Well, the first thing to note is that only SAT practice test 7 is entirely new–SAT practice tests 8-10 are a mix of new questions and recycled questions from the removed tests 1-3. This means that although students will have four new tests to practice with, they may run into questions that they have already answered, if they took practice 1-3 before they were removed from Bluebook.
Overall, the net gain of tests is 1 (from 6 available to 7 available) so this is overall good news for students looking to study. Furthermore, students who did take tests 1-3 before they were removed from Bluebook will still have access to those test breakdowns. This means that they will still be able to review and practice the questions from those tests on Khan Academy.
Note: as of yet, Khan Academy has not provided breakdowns of the new tests, but answer explanations are available directly on College Board’s website.
Why is College Board Removing Old Digital SAT Practice Tests?
Now that we know that students are gaining just 1 new practice SAT test, let’s take a few minutes to consider what is being lost and why.
College Board was pretty tight-lipped in the announcement of these changes, saying only that their goal is “to provide students with the most relevant practice resources.” We can speculate that with almost two years of data from students taking the Digital SAT, College Board has decided their original practice tests were too easy.
This hunch is shown in Piqosity’s own student response data. Our digital SAT practice tests, which we meticulously modeled after the College Board’s SAT tests 1-6, have accuracy rates nearly twice as high as the old paper SAT test or current pre-2025 ACT test. Seemingly after every official testing, we see student score reports with increasingly difficult scaling, showing that College Board was aware of the problem.
This theory is upheld in our initial examination of tests 7-10 which, on average, seem to be at a slightly higher difficulty than tests 1-3 were.
Question Difficulty in the Mathematics Test for Digital SAT Practice Tests 7-10
Without actual data from students taking the test, it can be hard to quantify differences in difficulty of two similar tests. That being said, a close analysis comparing the old practice Test 1 and the new practice Test 7 (the only completely new test) reveals certain evidence that suggests that the new questions might be tougher for students.
In the Math test, this increased difficulty is exemplified in a few ways:
- fewer easy questions on the hard second module
- generally more words in the easy questions that do appear, and
- the “easy” questions in the new tests tend to have more steps than the ones in the old test.
For example, look at an easy percentage question in the hard second module of Test 1 versus the hard second module of Test 7:
Test 1:
Test 7:
For context, the Mathematics Test of the Digital SAT works on the basis of increasing difficulty–meaning that the questions at the beginning of a module are easier than the ones at the end of a module. The question in Test 1 is the second question in the module while the question in test 7 is the third, meaning we can presume that these questions should be the same or very similar levels of difficulty.
While these are both fairly easy percentage questions, the one in Test 1 is certainly the simpler of the two; requiring only quick division, while the question in Test 7 is little more complicated, and requiring cross-multiplication or division by a fraction/decimal.
There also seems to be some adjustments in the hard questions at the end of the module–in the new tests they seem to ask about more obscure mathematical concepts that fewer students are likely to remember from their studies, like the slant height of a cone, than previous hard questions did.
Question Difficulty in the Reading and Writing Test for Digital SAT Practice Tests 7-10
Difficulty of question tends to be a little harder to gauge when it comes to the Reading and Writing questions, since such difficulty is largely subjective in the absence of student data, but an analysis of Test 7 suggests that the questions in the hard second module do tend to be noticeably harder than the ones in the hard second module of Test 1.
First of all, the hard second module for practice Test 1 had significantly more questions within what we might term “easier” subtopics, that is, subtopics that are shorter or require less thinking for students, like Words in Context, Grammar Agreement, and Transitions, than practice Test 7 does: 12 compared to 7. This being said, the two tests did have an equivalent amount of questions within overall harder subtopics: Quantitative Evidence, Textual Evidence/Supporting Ideas, and Inference.
Furthermore, the questions themselves seem to be harder overall in Test 7 than in Test 1. On average, the hard second module of Test 7 has more “technical” questions, that is, questions whose passages contain a number of specific statistics and/or highly technical scientific language (chemical compounds, Latin names of organisms, scientific jargon, etc.) that will likely be unfamiliar to students.
There are also more questions whose passages quote literary passages in the hard second module of Test 7 than there were in the same module of Test 1. Because literature quoted by the SAT is generally at least 100 years old, this tends to be a question-type that students struggle with.
Hard Second Module Practice Test 1 and 7 Comparison
| Easier Subtopics | Harder Subtopics | Word Count (across all passages) | Technical Passages | Lit-Based Passages | |
| Test 1 | 12 | 7 | 1,802 | 7 | 1 |
| Test 7 | 7 | 7 | 1,951 | 10 | 2 |
Beyond these factors, there are some other indications that the questions in Test 7 are more difficult. Let’s consider the Words in Context questions in particular. In the hard second module of Test 1 there were 7 vocabulary words tested, and in the same module of Test 7, there are 4 words tested.
Vocabulary Words Hard Second Module Test 1:
- Reciprocates
- Recognizable
- Ambivalence
- Diverse
- Intersect
- Tenuous
- Peripheral
Vocabulary Words Hard Second Module Test 7:
- Rectify
- Arduous
- Demarcated
- Notional
Using the tool Google Books Ngram Viewer, we can examine how common these words are in books from the year 1800-2022.
This graph shows trends in use of the words over time. Notice that a number of the words, particularly diverse and peripheral, have gotten more popular over time. This means that these are likely relatively recent words in the English lexicon, which also suggests that these words will be more familiar to the average high schooler.
Now, let’s take a look at the same graph for the vocabulary tested in the second module of Test 7. Here, we see an almost opposite trend; these words have largely gotten less popular over the past two hundred years, meaning it’s likely these words are more archaic than the words in the previous test, and thus less likely to be known by the average high schooler.
We can also see how much these words are used in 2022 (the last year with available data), as a percentage of all words used:
Test 1:
Test 7:
Understandably, these percentages are all fairly minuscule, but overall the percentages are smaller for Test 7, averaging just 0.00011645, compared to Test 1’s average of 0.00077646.
Of course, none of these characteristics are entirely objective, but taken on the whole, they seem to indicate that students might struggle more with Test 7’s Reading and Writing section than they did with Test 1’s.
Scoring Changes for new Digital SAT Practice Tests
Overall, any changes to question difficulty in the new tests are relatively minor–tests 7-10 resemble the old tests more than they differ from them. It is possible, then, that College Board has also adjusted their scoring algorithm in order to make the tests more difficult.
This hypothesis is fairly hard to test–little is known about how College Board scores the Digital SAT. Piqosity’s own scoring system is based on data collected from taking the Digital SAT practice tests available on Bluebook. There are things that cannot be accounted for, however, like the presence of “test” questions, or questions that are included in each Digital SAT module that do not count toward a student’s score.
Based on comparing data from the scoring of practice tests 1-4 with the scoring of practice tests 7-10, it seems possible that College Board has adjusted their scoring model to be slightly lower, thus making the tests harder.
One thing that also seems probable is that the threshold of correct answers required to reach the hard second module has shifted up slightly. Since reaching the hard second module automatically gives students a points boost, this is another change that will likely result in slightly lower scores overall.
Why is Digital SAT Practice Test 4 Remaining When 1-3 Have Been Removed?
This is a great question–if Digital SAT practice tests 1-4 were all at a slightly too-easy difficulty, why have only 1-3 been removed? Again, College Board has offered no explanation for this, so we can only speculate about why this decision was made.
Based on our analysis of Digital SAT practice test 4, it seems to be closer to the difficulty of tests 1-3 than that of tests 7-10. Why does it remain, then? The only answer that readily comes to mind is to ensure that students have more rather than fewer tests to practice with.
As the fourth of the original practice tests, it is also likely that the fewest students have taken it. Perhaps this means that College Board has the least data about it, and would like to continue to collect information about how students perform on it, or perhaps they have left it knowing that it is still new to more students than tests 1-3 are. (This issue of data collection was not an issue at Piqosity, because we gave our practice SAT tests non-numerical names and originally sorted them from least-answered to most-answered to ensure proper norming).
Students can continue to practice with Blue Book’s SAT 4, but they should be aware that it’s easier than the newer practice tests or what they’re likely to see on test day.
What These Changes Mean for Piqosity’s Digital SAT Practice Tests and Other Materials
At Piqosity, we are dedicated to providing students the highest quality, most up-to-date study materials. We know how important it is to have good, relevant questions that resemble actual test questions as closely as possible.
On March 13, 2025, we updated our scoring methodology to be more conservative. In particular:
- The SAT Reading & Writing cutoff to advance to the harder 2b module is now approximately 80% (up from 70%) accuracy in module 1.
- The SAT Math cutoff to advance to the harder 2b module is now approximately 70% (up from 60%) accuracy in module 2.
- In both tests, students receive a less significant score bump when making it to module 2b.
This SAT scoring methodology update is immediate and retroactive; therefore, most students will see a decrease in Piqosity’s predicted SAT scores. This decrease is generally fewer than 75 points but could be up to 200 points in edge cases.
We are also in the process of uprating the difficulty of our SAT full-length practice test questions themselves. Generally, we are swapping out 3-5 of the easiest questions in each module with more difficult ones; these changes are especially apparent in the harder modules 2b.
This update to our SAT scoring methodology also affects our scoring of SAT personalized practice.
