3 Notable Trends from the March 11 SAT
Having first piloted in November ‘21, the ‘Digital SAT’ has officially arrived, as international students were able to register and take the new, fully-online format of the test this month. (US students will be able to take the Digital SAT starting next year.) Go here for official information.
While it is yet to determine how CollegeBoard (the test’s publisher) plans to ‘curve’ the scores of a digital test and a conventional one, there were three clear, notable trends that every prospective test-taker should pay attention to.
#1 Reading: Relationships Matter
We continue to see an emphasis on questions asking about relationships between bulks of information, whether it be between sentence and sentence, between paragraph and paragraph, or between passage and passage (as in dual passages). In addition to seeing fewer and fewer questions with simple line references, this means that students want to make sure that they can identify where what kind of information should be in the passage.
An effective way to address this shift, as our Method suggests, is to ‘label’ the passage when first reading it.
#2 Writing & Language: Get in Line, Folks!
We have for long been confidently predicting that, when the SAT goes fully digital, there will be a much greater emphasis on Sentence Placement questions, and that Paragraph Placement questions will be introduced as well.
While it is yet to determine relevance, this month there were several Sentence Placement questions that were quite challenging, per our students’ review.
Another tidbit is that there continues to be a strong emphasis on punctuation errors, often combined with conjunction errors.
#3 Math: Keep Trig-ing
An interesting trend in the math section is that there seems to be a steady increase in the number of questions requiring the application of trigonometric principles. To be specific, while past trig questions mostly had to do with applying a reciprocal function (aka SOHCAHTOA) to a simple right triangle, we now see more and more questions that ask students to fundamentally identify trigonometric relationships in context.
But, much like the uptick we see in Distribution questions, this does not mean students need to invest a lot of time and effort into mastering trigonometry, but rather focus on the simple, redundant pattern of wording in the questions to locate key information.
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Written by Angelo (CEO of Lettuce Learn)
