Reading & Writing on the Digital SAT

Hey, guys! It’s Eric at Solution Prep. Today we’re talking about how the reading and writing questions are different now — on the new digital SAT — compared to how they were on the old paper and pencil test.

The SAT has gone digital worldwide and with it a lot of changes have come; most noticeably for reading and writing is that instead of having a reading section followed by a writing and language section, we now have two reading/writing modules featuring questions in both subjects, on both modules.

You’re going to get 27 questions per module, and 32 minutes to solve them; that averages out to a minute and 11 seconds per question. While some will take you more time, and some will take you less time. That’s just how averages work. But both modules are going to have the same six question types in the same order every time.

So let’s break down those six question types.

The first, is going to be Sentence Completion, and this is actually a return of an old question type that’s been on an 8-year hiatus. They’re going to give you a sentence, they’re going to give you a blank, they’re going to give you multiple choice options — what word belongs in that blank.

The next question type will be Reading Comprehension. This is a big change from what we’ve been used to with passage-based questions; where you’d have an 80-100 line story, followed by 10 or 11 questions. Now you have a three to five sentence story followed by one question; and the next question is a whole new three to five sentence story. They still do include things like tables, and charts, and graphs but they also might now include things like poetry that we didn’t have before.

Now many years ago, before 2016, we used to have Short Passage Comp where we’d have a have a paragraph with two questions. It’s not terribly different from that, but it’s still a big change from what we’ve just walked away from with the old paper and pencil test.

Now over the third question type is going to be Passage Completion. So it’s kind of like Reading Comprehension, and it’s kind of like Sentence Completion, but now you have to finish the story not with a word, but with a whole sentence or a big part of one.

The fourth question type is going to be Standard English, which is a combination of grammar and punctuation skills that used to featured in the writing and language section of the old paper and pencil SAT, but they’re going to be kind of swirled around and instead of underlining a word or phrase in a sentence, and give you a choice to fix it, including no change, they’re going to give you four options. One of them is right.

After that, the fifth question type is Transition Words that again, used to be in the writing and language section and again they’re going to be like Sentence Completion where they give you a sentence, they leave a word out but this time the word they leave out is a transitions that connects ideas.

And the sixth and final question type is going to be Notes questions. They’re going to give you four of five bullets and then ask you questions that come from those bullets. This is unlike any question we’ve ever had on the SAT before but still a little bit like some of those more passage-based reading style questions on the old writing and language section where the question itself can give you a lot about what they’re looking for in an answer.

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