EDITORIAL: You Choose: Pen and Paper or Touchpad and Keyboard?
The SAT—the most widely standardized test for college admissions in the Northeast—is going digital. This overhaul aims to make the SAT easier, shorter, and more accessible. However, paper testing remains our preferred option.
Standardized tests take multiple hours. When staring at a screen for so long, reading dense passages in minuscule font, it is inevitable that the words will blend together. As our eyes are flooded with blue light, our ability to concentrate deteriorates due to eye strain and fatigue. Being tired and distracted is not the ideal state to take an exam.
We will lose the ability to annotate with a pencil. Navigating an exam with a touchpad is not the same as graphite grinding on a test booklet. Ferris Jabr, in the Scientific American, notes that digital formats fail to replicate the tactility of reading on paper—a physicality that aids with retention and absorption. When we read e-texts, we tend to move on to the next page without reflection, a process key to ensuring we understand the presented material. There is a reason your teachers hound you to take notes on paper—you’ll forget much of the material otherwise.
During any math exam, doing work out on paper is essential. Many of us choose to do work right in the booklet to see the answers, questions, and our scratch work simultaneously. Even if the digital SAT provides test-takers with three to four sheets of printer paper—and more on request—it is impossible to look at the question and answer choices without tilting your head up at the screen. Losing your train of thought or accidentally selecting the incorrect answer just became much easier.
Despite all the drawbacks, we can all agree that a shorter test is always for the better. The new digital SAT combines the Reading and Writing sections into one while cutting down the duration of the test from over three hours to two hours and 14 minutes. It will adapt to your performance—the questions you receive for Module Two (each section is split into two modules) will be generated based on how you do in Module One. The length of reading passages has significantly shrunk, and each text corresponds with one question, thus removing the need to flip back and forth between the text and the question. We all know the wait for scores can feel like years, but with the switch to digital, scores will be sent out in a few days instead of weeks.
Unlike the SAT, the ACT will keep a paper option available when it goes digital. With many of us preferring the paper test, while others are comfortable taking it digitally, this is the way to go.
