Are you wondering if the SAT got hacked on March 8th? Did you have your score automatically submitted before you felt like you were done with the test? In this blog, we’re going to talk about the software glitch that impacted the SAT on March 8th, 2025.
As many of you may have heard across the world, students’ tests were abruptly submitted at 11 a.m. local time, regardless of whether students had finished the exam or not for many students. Now, this problem didn’t happen to every student who took the exam. Apparently, the College Board had sent a message to those who were proctors around 8 a.m. Eastern time saying to make sure everybody restarts their machines so you don’t get this 11 a.m. glitch. But this was after the test had begun, and they had already started checking in students and started this process. So, a lot of proctors didn’t get that information at all. It looks like it didn’t necessarily affect every computer, and was just a glitch that some versions of the software were having.
And just to give you a little bit of a timeline, the test is a 2-hour and 24-minute test including the 10-minute break, so 2 hours and 14 minutes of actual testing. So you’d have to start by 8:36a.m. to finish by 11. And I’ve taken SATs multiple times as an adult now—in paper form, not digital—and I don’t know if I’ve ever started by 8:36 a.m. Most of the time, the exam was actually starting around 9 a.m. even though the start time was 8 a.m. But 8 a.m. is the check-in time, when they bring all the students and they check their IDs. It takes a while and then they room you and read a boring script. So, this probably could have affected a lot of students. There was also a secondary issue in addition to cutting off at 11 a.m., which was that some of the proctors got the email late or over their break. So, they had the students restart their software mid-test. And then, when they had the students restart mid-test, the students lost significant time in whatever section they were on. One student on Reddit, for example, reported that he had 22 minutes left in the reading section he was on when his proctor made him restart. And by the time he got back in, he only had seven minutes, which is really bad. It created a disaster for a lot of students.
Here’s what the College Board has basically emailed students that are affected by this. First, they’ve told you that if early submission affected you, you will get a refund and a free retest. First, you get all your money back, and you get to take the test again for free. Second, many centers will offer a March 22nd retest exam or retake. However, if you choose to take the March 22nd exam, they will cancel your score from the March 8th exam. I don’t know why that’s such a big deal, but it might be that they’re reusing the questions, and they don’t want the same SAT taken twice, counting twice. I’m not really sure.
I think what’s crazy about this is the way it went down. I feel like the College Board needs more practice in managing crises because it’s not the first time we’ve had issues. This problem actually started internationally, right? There are reports from Vietnam, for example, that I saw. Australia may have had some, and New Zealand too. Who knows? So if the problem started on the other side of the world, even by the time the glitch started happening, New York should have had eight hours of warning. The College Board should have been emailing them in the middle of the night, not when they’re mid-test distribution. So that was kind of a problem. And basically, that email told them to restart the computer. And again, that’s how we got the secondary issue, right? It told them to restart the computer, and it was a little too late to do that. It’s kind of a pain. It’s a terrible situation.
What does this mean for the future of digital testing? I’m not quite sure. Was it hacking or a bug? I don’t know. Obviously, if it was hacked, they’re not going to tell anybody. They don’t want people to know that. It is also the kind of thing that could have been a stupid software glitch. We have no idea. It’s just kind of weird. So that’s what we know at this point. Did this affect you? If so, we’d love to know more about it. What are your thoughts on this? Let us know!
