Tucked away in a press release that most parents likely glanced at on their phones during the school run, the announcement was made on a Tuesday morning. A section on AI literacy will be added to the SAT by the College Board, a nonprofit that has influenced American college admissions for almost a century. In the fall of 2027, the new section will go live. 18 months. Students have that runway, which already seems shorter than it actually is.
This seems different to anyone who has seen the SAT evolve over the years—the calculator changes, the essay coming and going, the switch to digital testing in 2024, etc. larger. The College Board is not merely changing the format of questions or eliminating a section. It poses a query that the education community as a whole continues to struggle with: what does it really mean to be literate in artificial intelligence? Nobody seems to be completely certain. Teenagers will be required to exhibit it under time constraints in less than two years.
According to what has been shared thus far, the structure will be placed next to the current sections for math, reading, and writing. Students will respond to multiple-choice questions regarding accuracy, bias, source reliability, and reasoning in brief scenarios such as a chatbot output, a data summary, and an AI-generated image caption. On paper, it sounds a lot like the Craft and Structure questions from the current Reading and Writing section, but it’s dressed up. However, it seems that the College Board wants this to feel different. more recent. more pressing.
Last month, you could already see the wheels turning when you strolled through a tutoring facility in a suburban area of New Jersey. Math drills are written on whiteboards. Teens hunched over laptops running practice modules in a row. The new section was mentioned almost as an afterthought by the director, a woman who has been doing this work for nearly 20 years. Since the announcement, she claimed, her phone had not stopped ringing. Parents wanted to know what books they should purchase. As of yet, there are no books.
That contributes to the peculiar tension in this situation. Predictability is the foundation of the multibillion-dollar test preparation industry. Businesses prosper when they can provide families with a clear plan of action. However, scholars, legislators, and tech companies themselves continue to define AI literacy as a concept in real time. It is an experiment in and of itself to ask a sixteen-year-old to learn it for a standardized test while the adults are still debating its contents.
Additionally, there is the equity issue, which is a persistent problem with the SAT. AI tools are already being used on a daily basis by students in well-funded schools to write essays, debug code, and summarize readings. Students at underfunded schools are frequently not, sometimes as a result of their districts’ outright bans on the use of these tools. Rich families might be able to hire specialized tutors in eighteen months. For everyone else to catch up, it might not be sufficient. The College Board has announced that it is collaborating with Khan Academy, the same company that created the digital SAT, to provide free study materials. It’s still unclear if that bridges the gap or merely covers it.
The larger pattern is difficult to ignore. Schools are rushing to draft AI regulations. In order to accommodate chatbots, colleges are updating their application essay prompts. AI fluency is being screened by employers during interviews. The SAT is finally attempting to catch up—possibly overcorrecting—after always falling behind cultural changes. Or perhaps, for once, succeeding.
In any case, the countdown has begun. As a sophomore, eighteen months seems like a long time. When you are the one creating the curriculum, it seems insignificant.
