SAT

Practice for the digital SAT, organised the way College Board organises the test itself — by content domain, four in each of the two sections.

Information and IdeasIdeas 1 — evidence, data and what follows
Craft and StructureCraft 1 — words in context, purpose and two texts
Standard English ConventionsConventions 1 — boundaries, agreement and modifiers
Expression of IdeasExpression 1 — transitions and rhetorical synthesis
AlgebraAlgebra 1 — linear equations, systems and inequalities
Advanced MathAdvanced Math 1 — quadratics, exponents and growth
Problem-Solving and Data AnalysisData 1 — percentages, spread and what a sample proves
Geometry and TrigonometryGeometry 1 — triangles, circles and the facts to memorise

What the test actually is now

The SAT is digital, taken on a laptop or tablet in the Bluebook app, and it is much shorter than the paper test it replaced: 2 hours 14 minutes of testing, plus a 10-minute break between the two sections.

In each module, 2 of those questions are pretest questions being trialled for future tests. They do not count towards your score and you cannot tell which they are, so the only sane policy is to treat every question as real.

A calculator is allowed on the whole Math section. There is a graphing calculator built into the app, and you may bring your own approved one. The old no-calculator portion does not exist any more.

Adaptive, and what that means for how you should work

Each section is module-adaptive: how you do on the first module decides whether the second is harder or easier. The second module is where the ceiling of your score is set — a strong first module opens a harder second one, and a harder second one is what makes a high score reachable at all.

Two consequences follow, and both are unintuitive:

  1. The first module is the more important one, even though it looks like a warm-up. Nothing about it feels different; the questions inside a module are ordered easiest to hardest and they come from all four domains.
  2. Never leave a question blank. There is no penalty for a wrong answer on the SAT. An answer you are unsure of is strictly better than no answer, and on a timed adaptive module a guess on the last question is worth the same as a guess on the first.

The two sections, domain by domain

Both sections mix all four of their domains in every module, so "I am good at the reading part" is not a useful self-assessment — you are good, or not, at four fairly different things.

Reading and Writing. Every question has its own short passage, 25 to 150 words, and exactly one question attached to it. There is no long article with ten questions hanging off it and no going back to a passage you have already used.

Math. Roughly 75% multiple choice and 25% student-produced response — you type the answer rather than choosing it, which removes the option of working backwards from the choices.

Note the weighting before you plan your revision: Algebra and Advanced Math are 70% of the Math section between them. A week spent on circle theorems buys you at most a couple of questions.

Scoring

Three numbers: a total score of 400–1600 in 10-point steps, and two section scores of 200–800 each, which simply add up to the total. There are no subscores or cross-test scores on the digital SAT — those were reported on the paper test and are gone.

Your score is not a percentage of questions right. It comes from a scaling process that also accounts for which module you were routed into, which is why two students with the same raw count can finish with different scores.

How these materials are organised

One category per content domain — four for Reading and Writing, four for Math — because that is the unit College Board builds the test from and the unit your score report talks about. Work by domain rather than by "section", since a weak domain is a specific, fixable thing and a weak section is not.

These materials do not reproduce the adaptive test. They are practice on the content: the skills each domain names, in the question shapes that domain uses. For the experience of the real thing — the timer, the routing between modules, the built-in calculator, the interface — use College Board's own full-length adaptive practice tests in Bluebook. They are free, they are the real software, and nothing else is a substitute for them.

How to use these materials

  1. Find out what score you actually need before you decide how much of this to do. The gap between a 1250 and a 1450 is months of work; the gap between where you are and where the colleges on your list sit may be much smaller than you think, or much larger.
  2. Spend your time in proportion to the weighting. Algebra and Advanced Math first, Craft and Structure and Information and Ideas first on the other side.
  3. Read the explanation even when you were right. On Standard English Conventions in particular, being right by ear and being right by rule look identical until the question is a hard one.
  4. Practise Math without the multiple choice sometimes. A quarter of the Math section gives you no options to work backwards from, and the habit of eliminating choices is exactly what fails there.
  5. Do a timed full-length test in Bluebook before you are ready. Two hours fourteen is short, and finding out how short is better done early.

Official sources

Zestly is an independent study tool. It is not affiliated with College Board, which owns the SAT, and it is not a test centre. Every question here is written by Zestly; no official test material is reproduced. Registration, fees, accommodations, test dates and score reporting are matters for College Board and for the colleges asking you for a score.