What the test is, how the adaptive modules decide your score, and what each section actually asks.
The SAT went fully digital — internationally in March 2023 and in the United States in March 2024. It is not the paper test on a screen. It is shorter, it is adaptive, the reading passages are a fraction of their old length, and a calculator is now allowed on all of the maths. If your mental model of the SAT is more than a couple of years old, most of it is out of date.
This page covers the format, the adaptive structure, the timings, the question types and the scoring. Two things it deliberately does not cover are fees and test dates: both change every cycle, a stale fee is worse than no fee, and the College Board's own site is one click away and always current.
Two sections, each split into two modules. 2 hours 14 minutes of testing, plus a 10-minute break between the sections.
| Section | Modules | Questions | Time |
|---|---|---|---|
| Reading & Writing | 2 × 27 | 54 | 32 + 32 min |
| Math | 2 × 22 | 44 | 35 + 35 min |
| Total | 4 | 98 | 2 h 14 min |
Plus a 10-minute break between the two sections.
Within a module you can move freely: skip forward, come back, flag questions for review, change answers. Between modules you cannot. When a module's clock runs out — or you submit it early — that module is closed for good.
A small number of questions in each section are unscored pretest questions, placed there so the College Board can calibrate them for future tests. They look exactly like the real ones and there is no way to identify them, which is the practical point: treat every question as if it counts, because you cannot tell.
The Digital SAT is multistage adaptive. It adapts between modules, not between questions — a distinction that matters, because it means a single wrong answer never sends the next question spiralling.
Everyone starts a section with a first module of mixed difficulty. Your performance on that whole module decides which second module you receive: a lower-difficulty version or a higher-difficulty one. Reading & Writing and Math adapt independently, so a hard second Math module says nothing about which Reading & Writing module you got, and vice versa.
The consequence people find surprising: which second module you get affects the score you can reach. Harder questions are worth more, so the top of the range available through the lower-difficulty module sits below the top available through the harder one. Two students can answer the same number of questions correctly and score differently.
The practical reading of this is not to panic about module 1 — it is to pace module 1 properly. Rushing the first module to "save time" is the one strategy the structure actively punishes, because there is no time to save: the second module has its own clock either way.
This is the half of the test this site's practice questions cover. Two modules, 27 questions each, 32 minutes each — about 71 seconds per question.
The biggest change from the old SAT is passage length. There are no more 500–750 word passages with ten questions hanging off them. Every question now carries its own short passage of roughly 25 to 150 words, and moves on. Some questions come with a table or a graph instead of, or alongside, prose. Reading is still the bottleneck — there is simply far less of it per question.
Questions inside a module are grouped by domain rather than shuffled, and within each group they run roughly easiest to hardest. In practice this means the grammar questions arrive together, the reading-comprehension questions arrive together, and you can feel the difficulty step up inside each block and then reset at the start of the next one. That reset is worth knowing about: a run of hard questions usually ends rather than continuing.
The College Board publishes the weighting by domain, as a share of the 54-question section:
| Domain | Share | Questions (of 54) |
|---|---|---|
| Craft and Structure | ~28% | 13–15 |
| Information and Ideas | ~26% | 12–14 |
| Standard English Conventions | ~26% | 11–15 |
| Expression of Ideas | ~20% | 8–12 |
Note that these are ranges, and that they are published per domain, not per question type. Anyone quoting you an exact number of Transitions questions on your specific test is guessing — the College Board does not publish that, and the ranges above are what is actually knowable.
Every Reading & Writing question is one of these. Each links to free practice and a longer explanation.
Words in Context — choose the word
that completes a passage most logically and precisely, or say what a word means where it sits.
This is the only place vocabulary is tested, and the tested words are ordinary academic ones.
Text Structure and Purpose —
what a sentence does for the passage, not what it says.
Cross-Text Connections — two
short texts on one subject; how would the second author answer the first?
Central Ideas and Details — the
main idea of a passage, or a detail it states.
Command of Evidence: Textual
— which quotation or finding would most strengthen, illustrate or weaken a claim.
Command of Evidence: Quantitative
— read a table or graph and pick the choice the data supports. No arithmetic required.
Inferences — complete the text with the
conclusion it forces. Nothing from outside the passage.
Boundaries — where sentences end and which
punctuation may join what: periods, semicolons, colons, commas, dashes.
Form, Structure and Sense —
subject-verb agreement, verb tense, pronouns, modifier placement, parallelism.
These two are the most learnable questions on the test. They are mechanical, they have definite answers, and they are a quarter of the section. If you are short on time, start here.
Transitions — the logical connector between
two sentences.
Rhetorical Synthesis — given a
student's bulleted notes and a stated goal, which sentence accomplishes the goal.
Two modules of 22 questions, 35 minutes each — 44 questions in 70 minutes, about 95 seconds per question. Roughly three-quarters are multiple choice; the rest are student-produced responses, where you type the answer instead of choosing it.
A calculator is allowed on the entire section. There is no longer a no-calculator module. A graphing calculator is built into the testing app, and you may also bring your own approved one — most people who practise with the built-in tool end up preferring it, because it is the one that will definitely be there.
The content is Algebra, Advanced Math, Problem-Solving and Data Analysis, and Geometry and Trigonometry. A reference sheet of formulas is available on screen throughout.
This site's practice covers Reading & Writing only. That is a deliberate scope choice rather than an oversight — we would rather do one section thoroughly than both thinly.
Two section scores, 200 to 800 each — one for Reading & Writing, one for Math — added to give a total of 400 to 1600. There is no separate essay; the optional essay was retired.
Your raw score (questions right) is converted to the scaled score through a process that accounts for which second module you received and for small difficulty differences between test forms. This is why raw-to-scaled conversion tables from practice tests are approximations and why two students with the same number correct can land on different scores.
There is no penalty for a wrong answer. A blank and a wrong guess both score zero. Never leave a question unanswered — if the clock is about to run out, fill in the remaining ones without reading them.
Scores also come with a percentile, showing how you did against a nationally representative sample of test-takers. Digital scores are returned much faster than the paper test's — typically within days rather than weeks.
The test runs in Bluebook, the College Board's own testing application, on a laptop or tablet. You install it in advance and complete exam setup before test day — this is what generates your admission ticket, and it is the step most commonly left too late.
You may use your own device or one provided by your school or test centre; if you have neither, the College Board's device-request process exists for exactly that and has a deadline well before the test date. Bring your fully charged device, its charger, an acceptable photo ID and your admission ticket.
Bluebook itself gives you a countdown clock you can hide, a flag-for-review tool, an answer-eliminator, an on-screen calculator and reference sheet for Math, and an annotation tool for Reading & Writing. If the connection drops mid-test, your work is saved locally — the test continues.
The College Board publishes full official practice tests inside Bluebook itself. Those are the closest thing to the real experience that exists, and taking at least one is worth more than any amount of reading about the format — including this page.
For the Reading & Writing section specifically, the order that produces points fastest is not the order the test presents them in:
1. Standard English Conventions first. Boundaries and Form, Structure and Sense are a quarter of the section, they are mechanical, and they have definite answers you can learn in an afternoon. Nothing else on the test converts study time into points at this rate.
2. Then Transitions. One rule — name the relationship before you look at the choices — fixes most of the misses.
3. Then whichever reading skill you are actually missing. Take a full module, read the breakdown of which skills you lost points on, and drill only those. Grinding another whole module before fixing the leak just measures the same leak again.
4. Vocabulary, continuously, in the background. The word list supports Words in Context — but it also quietly speeds up every other question, because a passage you read fluently is a passage you have more time to think about.
2 hours and 14 minutes of testing time, plus a 10-minute break between the two sections. Reading & Writing is 64 minutes (two 32-minute modules) and Math is 70 minutes (two 35-minute modules).
98 in total: 54 in Reading & Writing (27 per module) and 44 in Math (22 per module). A small number in each section are unscored pretest questions, and there is no way to tell which ones.
It is multistage adaptive, which means it adapts between modules rather than between questions. Everyone gets the same kind of first module; how you do on it determines whether your second module in that section is the lower-difficulty or higher-difficulty version. Reading & Writing and Math adapt independently of each other, and you cannot return to a module once you have left it.
Effectively, yes. Questions are worth different amounts depending on difficulty, so the highest score reachable through the lower-difficulty second module is below the highest reachable through the harder one. This is why the first module matters more than its question count suggests, and why pacing early is worth practising.
No. A wrong answer and a blank both score zero, so there is never a reason to leave a question unanswered. Answer every question, even if you have to guess with seconds left.
Two section scores of 200 to 800 each — one for Reading & Writing, one for Math — added together for a total of 400 to 1600. Raw correct answers are converted to the scaled score through a process that accounts for which second module you received and for small differences between test forms.
Yes, on the entire Math section. A graphing calculator is built into the Bluebook testing app, and you may also bring your own approved calculator. There is no longer a no-calculator module.
That depends entirely on the colleges on your list, and the policies have been moving in both directions — several selective universities have reinstated a testing requirement since 2024. Check each college's current policy directly rather than relying on a general rule, and note that "test-optional" and "test-blind" are different things: at a test-optional college a strong score still helps.
Both change every cycle, so this page deliberately does not quote them — a stale fee or date is worse than none. Check the College Board's own registration pages, which are always current, and note that fee waivers exist for eligible students.
Sources and shelf life. Format, timings, question counts, domain weightings and scoring on this page come from the College Board's published Digital SAT specifications and support material. Where only a range is published, this page quotes the range rather than inventing a number. Test structure does change between cycles — verify anything here against the College Board's own pages before making a decision that depends on it, and treat fees, dates and college testing policies as things to check directly, every time.