Project specialist Lisa Gorzell used to have to count, organize and ship off all ninth, 10th and 11th grade students’ bubble documents in 16 boxes to UPS for the paper PSAT, which could take more than two days. But now for the new digital PSAT, she just has to report any irregularities, whether that be technical difficulties or a test that didn’t get fully submitted, to College Board and shred all the student’s sign-in tickets.

“And that was it,” Gorzell said. “I enjoyed it because it was much easier. I mean don’t get me wrong, it took me a long time to plan and learn it all, but I think it was efficient. I also think the kids enjoyed it better too.” 

On Wednesday, Oct. 11, McCallum students took their first digital Preliminary Scholastic Aptitude Test, or PSAT, which is a National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test. The paper version of the PSAT measured how quickly and correctly a student could answer questions. Now with the digital version, the test measures the knowledge and skills students need to have for college and gives them more time to answer each question. 

According to College Board, the main reason the PSAT is now online is that it’s easier to take, more secure, more relevant and allows more time for students to answer each question. It will also use a system called “adaptive testing” that determines the difficulty of the next questions depending on a student’s proficiency on the previous questions. There are also more resources available for students taking the test like different color highlighters, annotation boxes, a timer and breaks that students can schedule themselves. 

“I don’t know if a lot of students noticed that you could control when you wanted to take breaks and basically pause your test,” Gorzell said. 

Overall junior George Brode liked the way the digital PSAT was set up, but there was just one thing that he didn’t like about it. 

“I thought it was pretty efficient, easy to manage and less stressful—especially without worrying about a bubble sheet,” Brode said. “The only thing that I didn’t like was that you had to wait for the time to run out before you could move on to the next part even if you finished 20 minutes early.” 

Many students also enjoy that submitting your answers doesn’t involve bubbling, which gives them more time to focus on completing their work and eliminates the chance of getting answers wrong due to incorrect bubbling on their Scantron.

Also, with the test being online now, it significantly reduces the amount of paper teachers have to handle.

“It definitely made it easier for teachers because they don’t have to worry about bubble sheets, counting bubble sheets and passing everything out,” Gorzell said. “There’s no test booklet. I mean [with the paper PSAT] there was a test booklet, a bubble sheet and there were answer-sheet instructions. So, there was a lot of paper. Now, it was just scratch paper and the sign-in ticket, so it definitely reduced the amount of paper we were handling and using.”

Another change College Board made was that students could use a graphing calculator in the entire math section. On the old test, there was one part of the math section on which students were prohibited from using calculators and another part on which students could use them.

Upon hearing that students could now get calculators for the whole test, senior National Merit Commended Scholar Keegan Sarwate noticed how this was unfair for students who previously didn’t get calculators on the whole test. 

“I definitely wish we’d been allowed that [calculators],” Sarwate said. “That’s a huge advantage and takes out a lot of the errors that cause people to miss questions. I definitely would have done better if we’d had that.”

When hearing that the PSAT was going virtual, however, Sarwate wasn’t surprised considering many tests are moving toward mostly everything towards online versions. To them, it was only a matter of time before the PSAT became virtual too.

“I feel like doing the PSAT digitally makes sense since the STAAR test is digital too,” Sarwate said. “But it does seem a lot more prone to things like crashing and technical delays that can affect how well people do.”

To limit the amount of technical delays, students reported to their PSAT testing room with their proctor during FIT a week before the test happened to go over the Bluebook testing site.

“Something that helped us [get used to the new test] was doing the digital readiness check,” Gorzell said.  “It gave the students an opportunity to see what the Bluebook app was going to look like, get in there, go through all the questions they may have, and we could figure out what problems we were going to have on test day.”

There were still some problems teachers ran into. Some of those included the Bluebook application blinking, test day toolkits in College Board lagging and tests that wouldn’t fully submit. Because of all these issues, librarian Jain Orr designed a troubleshooting list that addressed any issues teachers might encounter. 

“Anyone who had issues, who wasn’t able to do everything as we expected, came [to the library],” Orr said. “We had around 80 kids, which was a lot. As people were coming in, we were figuring it out as we did it. I was basically separating people and started attacking the issues. I was powerwashing [the computers], which is a forced reset. It was sort of like building the plane as we flew it. But based on all of that, it was sort of like a rapid research project. Based on different screens, we could tell how to help each student.”

In the past, it took weeks or even months for the PSAT scores to come back, but with the test being online, students received their scores today, Nov. 6, which is a little less than a month before when students received their scores in 2022. 

“I want to thank the kids and our teachers for being so patient since it was just a lot to learn in a short amount of time,” Gorzell said. “Overall, I think it’s a lot better for everybody.”

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