What is the SAT?

The SAT is generally taken by high school students who will soon be applying to post-secondary colleges and universities, though the test is open to anyone over the age of 12 desiring to attend college or university in the US. All that is required is to pay the registration fee which can be waived in certain circumstances. After taking the test, students can elect to send their official scores to any college or university to which they would like to gain admission.

Students should be careful in taking the SAT multiple times, as the College Board will send ALL previous scores to these universities. For this reason, students should not take the SAT more than 3 times total, and should be careful to study between these tests to make sure each successive score report shows an improvement over the previous. There is an advantage to taking the test more than once, however, as many universities will combine the highest score for each of the sections across multiple test dates. For example, if you score 650 on the Critical Reading, 600 on the Math, and 650 on the Writing section the first time you took the SAT and 680 on the Critical Reading, 580 on the Math, and 660 on the Writing section many colleges will consider your total score to be the 680 for Critical Reading from the second time you took the SAT, the 600 for Math from your first SAT, and the 650 from your first SAT for the Writing Section.

The SAT is administered 7 times a year in the United States, in October, November, December, January, March (or sometimes April), May, and June. The SAT is usually offered on the first Saturday of the month for November, December, May and June. Outside of the United States, the SAT is offered on the same dates as in the United States except for the first spring test date, which is either March or April.

What's on the SAT?

The SAT consists of three sections: math, critical reading, and writing. Scores on each section range from 200 to 800, with scores always being a multiple of 10 (i.e. 580, 720, never 645 or 643). The scores for each of the sections are added together for the composite score, with a 2400 being a "perfect" SAT score. Students do not need to get all answers on the SAT correct to get a perfect score. More details are below in the Scoring section.

In addition to the 9 sections that count towards the student's score, there is a 10th section that will not count but that the College Board administers to test questions for future SATs. This extra section does not count towards a student's score. During the test, students will not know which section will not count towards their final score so they should treat each section as though it does count. What is known, however, is that the essay, which is always the first section on the SAT, and Section 10, which is always a ten minute writing section, will always count towards a student's SAT score.

How is the SAT scored?

Each of the questions within a section is ordered by difficulty, other than questions that follow the long and short reading passages which are organized with respect to where in the passage they refer. Thus a question referencing an early part of the passage will occur before a question asking about the passage's conclusion, regardless of difficulty.

Each question on the SAT is worth 1 point regardless of difficulty. Though most questions are multiple choice, 10 math questions require a numerical answer that the test taker must bubble in on his or her answer sheet. For each of the multiple choice questions, a correct answer will add 1 point to a student's "raw" score, an incorrect answer will deduct 0.25 points to the raw score, and a blank answer will yield 0 points. For the 10 math questions that require a numerical answer, a correct answer adds 1 point to the raw score and an incorrect answer is worth 0 points.

The total number of a student's correct answers (a student's "raw score") on a section gets compared to all other students who took that same test and converted to a "scaled score" from 200 to 800. We commonly think of this as grading on a curve.

Scaling is done to make sure that the same percentage of people on each test receive the same score to maintain consistency between SAT tests. This process of taking a raw score and computing the equivalant scaled score based on all students' performance on that test is what makes the SAT a standardized test.

What should I bring?