I took the digital PSAT in my junior year. That was the first ever digital PSAT administered to high school students nationwide—the year before, I had taken the PSAT on paper. Lining up outside, everyone carrying a school-issued chromebook can be a weird sight. There are a lot of excuses to hate on the digital SAT and PSAT, but is it really such a bad thing?

First, the digital SATs and PSATs have less questions in all sections and have overall shorter exam lengths, providing more time per question, which makes the digital SAT much more approachable. Both the combined reading-and-writing section and math sections are shorter. In fact, the notoriously long passages on the reading section are now a distant past. Wouldn’t that be a good thing? There’s less pressure during the exam for students because they have more time per question, which is something students have collectively desired.

Digital SAT haters bring up that it’s not standardized anymore; it’s “adaptive,” meaning that your performance on your first reading-and-writing module will determine the questions on your next module (as for the math modules too), leading students to believe that the scoring is inconsistent across different test-takers. However, this argument is flawed because by that logic, the paper SAT also wouldn’t be standardized—students taking SATs given on different dates are given different SAT forms. In truth, the SAT is “standardized” because getting a 1400 on, say, the October 2023 SAT is scaled to reflect the same difficulty as getting a 1400 on, say, the November 2023 SAT. This is still the case with the digital SAT, as with many other adaptive standardized tests like the GRE or GMAT for college students.

Lastly, it’s simply convenient. You don’t have to worry about bubbling in answers on an answer booklet, or waiting for your proctor to pass out their huge stack of paper packets—all you need is a laptop. Also, it reduces usage of millions of pounds in test papers around the globe, which is always good for the environment. Who would want to waste all that paper? So next time you go in for your digital SAT, don’t be sad that it used to be on paper, because the digital age is our future.