SAT practice test: SAT prep courses, SAT practice questions and a digital SAT study plan

The SAT is no longer a three-hour paper test. It is taken in College Board's Bluebook app, it runs 2 hours and 14 minutes of testing time, and it contains 98 questions. Each of the two sections is split into two modules, and a handful of questions are unscored pretest items that you cannot identify. A lot of prep material still floating around online was written for the old paper exam, and practicing the wrong format wastes weeks.

• Reading and Writing: two modules of 27 questions, 32 minutes each
• Math: two modules of 22 questions, 35 minutes each
• A 10-minute break between the two sections
• Scored 400 to 1600, with each section scored 200 to 800
• A built-in Desmos graphing calculator is available for the entire Math section

The digital SAT is multistage adaptive. How you perform on module one of a section determines whether module two is the easier or the harder form, and the harder form is the one that carries the higher scoring ceiling. That has a blunt strategic consequence: accuracy early in a section is worth more than accuracy late in it. If you routinely give away three careless points in the first module because you were still warming up, you are capping your own score before the test has really started. Practice the opening of a section the way a sprinter practices the block start.

• Warm up before test day so module one is not your warm-up
• Do not leave module-one questions blank: there is no wrong-answer penalty
• Flag and return, but finish module one with time to check the first five questions

These are two different tools and students constantly substitute one for the other. A full-length practice test tells you where you stand and trains your stamina and pacing, so take them at real length, in one sitting, on the real interface. But a practice test is a measurement, not a treatment. You cannot take a test every day. Between them you need volume: hundreds of questions of the specific type you keep missing, each one reviewed until you can articulate why the answer you chose was wrong. That is the gap this tool fills.

• Use official Bluebook full-length tests for timing, stamina and score checks
• Use high-volume question practice, by type, for the actual improvement
• Review every miss in writing: what the question tested, and why your answer was wrong

Random mixed practice feels productive and hides the weakness you need to find. Scores move fastest when you generate a set of nothing but linear-equation problems, or nothing but transition questions, and run it until the pattern is automatic. Most students have three or four recurring leaks, and once those leaks are named, they close quickly.

• Math: algebra, advanced math, problem solving and data analysis, geometry and trigonometry
• Reading and Writing: information and ideas, craft and structure, expression of ideas, Standard English conventions
• Standard English conventions is the most learnable content on the whole exam