Deciding between the SAT and ACT is a pivotal choice many high school juniors make. The introduction of the new digital SAT marks a departure from the traditional paper format, offering significantly more time per question than the current SAT or ACT, lasting two hours instead of three, delivering your score in days instead of weeks and including a powerful built-in Desmos graphing calculator.

The College Board — the nonprofit organization that creates the SAT and AP tests — debuted the first digital SAT for international test takers in March 2023. On March 9, 2024, the next SAT testing date, all testing locations will only administer digital tests.

The College Board emphasizes the digital SAT’s advantages, including a reimagined testing format and a more efficient scoring system. For the reading and writing sections, the structure of the questions is also different: passages are shorter, and there is only one question per passage. Notably, the math section features a built-in Desmos graphing calculator, which can find the mean and median of numbers, graph functions and solve systems of equations.

Additionally, the digital SAT uses an adaptive testing format, breaking the test into four modules — two for math and two for reading and writing. The difficulty of the questions in the second module of each section — be it math or reading and writing — is contingent upon the test taker’s performance in the initial module.