Since US students took the first digital SAT in spring of 2024, College Board has visibly tussled with the test difficulty and scoring. For example, the first four official practice tests in the Blue Book app were far too easy and off-base compared to what students actually saw in the testing room.

Those practice tests are now retired and no longer accessible. Most recently, the PSAT cutoff scores for National Merit Commended and Semifinalist went down significantly for the class of 2027. Within this environment, Piqosity is announcing the second major update to our 12 digital SAT practice tests.

In total we have entirely replaced nearly 20% of the questions in Math module 1 and 2b. We removed many of the easiest questions and replaced them with ones that require an additional step or a little bit more novel thinking. The net effect of these changes is that it’s now harder to get to module 2b, and we expect the average difficulty of Module 1 to increase from 4.5 out of 9 (where it previously was) to 5, which is our statistical target.

In Module 2b, the module seen by the highest scoring students, we similarly replaced easier questions with ones that require a deeper understanding of advanced math concepts.

Finally, because our SAT practice tests are named for the residential colleges of Rice University (which is neither affiliated with nor endorses Piqosity), we renamed test 12, “Test Chao” in honor of Rice’s newest college.

At Piqosity we are committed to providing students with the most rigorous and precise practice tests possible. We have been publishing these updates in real time over the last several months. With today’s announcement, the primary changes are now complete; however, our editors are always making small tweaks according to our real-time student data.