​Now in its second year as a digital test, the College Board’s PSAT was taken by high school juniors and sophomores across the country during October 2024, with schools allowed to schedule their test date any time during the month.

​Ahead of the digital SAT launch in 2024, the Preliminary SAT, or PSAT, has gone digital in the United States with the October 2023 test, presenting students with a completely new format and scoring structure from prior versions and featuring a shortened testing time with fewer questions.
 

​In the aftermath of the Covid pandemic, both the ACT and College Board (SAT) were forced to adapt to rapidly changing dynamics like school closures and enhanced safety measures that made offering their paper-based tests more difficult. As a result, both have pushed forward with efforts to offer a digital, computer-based test going forward. The companies are taking different approaches to the rollout and test formats, so students in the Class of 2025 and later need to understand the new offerings, their scheduled rollouts, and how they will affect college admissions testing for this class and future classes. Class of 2024: none of this will affect you.

Juniors who took the PSAT/NMSQT test in October 2022 received their scores back on December 5 or 6. Consider this the starting gun for your test preparation and planning efforts over the next 12 months. Not sure what else the test and its many scores mean?
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​Since March, the college admissions test process has become a string of hits and misses for students, test providers of the ACT and SAT, and colleges trying to inject equity into a chaotic admissions process. Many seniors were ultimately unable to test or decided that the effort was not worth it. With senior testing now complete, test capacity should open up for juniors who have been unable to test so far. With that in mind, those juniors planning to test in the first half of 2021 should prepare now to ensure their test plan succeeds.