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Despite the Collegeboard’s claim that the new SAT was a small change from its predecessor, it was an enormous change: the test is now digital and adaptive, students are scored on only 90 questions and the scores are less reliable, and not only the format but the content of the Verbal section was radically changed.
Less often noted, however, is the radical change wrought by making Desmos available to all test-takers as an on-screen calculator in the Math section.
This on-screen calculator is incredibly powerful, with far more utility than the graphing calculators that students can bring to the test themselves. If students know how to use the Desmos calculator, they are at a significant advantage. If they do not, they are more likely to miss what could be easy questions and to spend significantly more time trying to solve those questions.
For example, if given three coordinate points and asked to solve the equation of a quadratic, students would need to do a lot of substitution into the equation of a quadratic to solve.
But not with Desmos.
Auto-Regression
With Desmos, students just input the three coordinate points, such as (4, 32), (7,95), and (-1,7), click the “auto-regression” button, and Desmos instantly gives them the equation of the quadratic:
Distance Formula
What about finding the distance between two points?
It can do that too.
Intersection of Two Lines
Find the intersection of two functions? No problem.
Vertex of a Parabola
Find the coordinates of the vertex of a parabola? Absolutely. And just as easily, students could move their mouse over the x and y-intercepts to see those coordinates as well.
Vastly More
Those are just a few of the many capabilities of Desmos.
Though Desmos is not a cure-all, it is a great antidote to the complexity of many questions. There are innumerable resources online to learn how to use this calculator on the SAT. But, if students would like instruction on how to master it, we are happy to help and offer both private instruction and Desmos bootcamps.
