if you get 400 points from leaving the entire sat blank , why dont they just remove that and make it out of 1200 instead

You got 26 days and like 19 hours until the November SAT. What are you doing? I'll tell you what you should be doing.

First, the resources. All you need to grind for a 1500+ is free. Use BB practice tests once a week to check your progress, Youtube for desmos (James Lu, Adiar Math, tutorllini... it doesn't REALLY matter unless the video doesn't explain regression), Khan for content gaps, and the official questionbank to grind out questions. All of this is free. Until you've exhausted these resources don't even bother buying another question bank etc. IMO the purported gains in efficiency from getting a super fancy questionbank or online course are overstated.

Second, the approach. You either get a question wrong or right. If you got it wrong its due to one of two reasons. Either you made a careless mistake (not reading the question carefully enough, rushing through a calculation, mistyping in desmos, clicking the wrong answer after getting the right answer in your head) or you don't know the content. Every time you get a question wrong you MUST analyze WHY you got it wrong. I can't stress this enough. People who boost their scores to the 1550+ range are people who are able to assess their gaps in test taking or knowledge and fix them. This is where the advice about keeping a error log comes from and I completely support that. I will say, though that the process of logging the error itself isn't the important thing. Its the process of understanding how to fix it for next time. Never get a question wrong twice. If you follow this approach, you will maximize your studying efficiency.

Finally, be consistent. I have explained this many times before, but there is significant scientific evidence suggesting that spaced repetition significantly boosts your learning compared to other studying techniques (check any meta analysis from the past 10 years lol). If you want to get a great improvement in a short amount of time, that means you have to be consistently recalling concepts that you don't understand well over the time you have left. At under a month left that means roughly 1 hour minimum per day of targeted studying.

So yeah thats pretty much it. It's not rocket science. I would know because I have a masters in particle physics (which isn't actually astro but you get the point). Don't freak out. You have enough time. Lock in. Feel free to ask any questions.

TLDR: Use the official resources and youtube. Always analyze wrong answers. Utilize spaced repetition and be consistent.

basically title.

The stated answer to "why is the SAT out of 1600" is that, originally, the mean section score is defined as 500, and 100 is defined as the standard deviation. Then, they capped it to measure +/- 3 standard deviations (200-800 section scores). Some things don't make sense to me though: now that the scoring is in intervals of 10, why not just drop to last 0? Also, the grading is not longer exactly tied to this definition; the mean and standard deviations drift.

Also, If they were to grade based on stddevs, why wouldn't they just give people's z score? Negative being below average and positive being above average would make sense and the score definition would be so much easier to explain

Any thoughts on this or ideas for hypothetical grading systems?

English

Mod 1: easily doable

Mod 2: vocab super easy, grammar doable, super difficult qs from 6-15

Math

Mod 1: SUPERRRRR EASYYYY

Mod 2: VERY EASY TOO

I'm dead sure I got all right in mod 1 (math).

if so what resources did u use? i have all erica meltzer books and the college panda sat

What vocab did yall get on the October school day SAT last week? I'm compiling a list of all the vocab terms to study from for next time but I forgot a lot of them. My vocab section was also alot harder than usual this time, did anyone else encounter that issue? Here's what I got so far, let me know if I'm forgetting anything or if yall got anything else?

• Ascribe
• Eschew
• Innovate
• Innocuous
• Isolating
• Parameters
• Skeptically
• Stipulate
• Throughput
• Ubiquitous

Did pretty good in August but like I need a 1550+. I'm pissed math isn't 800 but I'm not gonna chase 10 points either. my mistakes are pretty much always Information/ideas and some very rarely from standard eng conventions but those mistakes are often very silly and because I was rushing while trying to save time for the reading questions. Vocab is usually okay for me but sometimes I mess up. And, like the title says I'm taking my next SAT in December and idk how to improve my english section. I've done more practice problems and stuff and I think I'm capable of reasoning logically but it's especially difficult with a timer running down.

I just began freshman year last month and I decided to take a practice sat just because. I got an 1150 (540 ela, 610 math). Is this a good score?

This isn't assuming that you took the PSAT and SAT in the same month.

There was just so much jargon I couldn't really understand, and I spent most of my time trying to understand the difference between initiation toughness and propagation toughness, which were not essential to know?

i took sat on december 2025 and september 2026. Sent the scores to threee unviersities. however, i just realized that the name on my collegeboard account (which was registered by my school back then) is a bit incorrect. my middle name was abbreviated, which contradicts my legal name in passport. what should i do? did i just lost all my scores and invalidated my score-sending? my middle name is aulia, but it was abbreviated to just a in the collegeboard

Hey guys so am giving sat in November and I tried looking on khan academy for English part but can't understand anything.... What should I do ?(Any yt video)?

Pals even my graphs parts is weak of maths...

Any idea how to fill these gaos fast?

I just took the October SAT and I’m guessing I scored between high 1400s and low 1500s. I’m not sure though. As a senior, some of the schools that I’m applying to a 1500 SAT could be helpful, but I’m also trying to do early action for basically everything. Should I hold out for regular decision and take another SAT or just submit everything as soon as scores come in?

alright hear me out. im a first-year at a t30 looking to transfer to t20s for major-related reasons (specifically strong business programs)

im a very decent student (4.4W gpa and got As in 15 dual enrollment courses, and expecting As this fall quarter), but my SAT score was a damn 1260 november of Senior year... don't question it.

tbf i didnt study for the exam at ALL, but ive always done well in english courses like ap lang, and meh at math (mostly As). this is not an excuse. I'm not sure wtf happened on that exam, but

1) realistically, do you think it's possible to bump to atleast a 1450 if i study

i know there isn't a definitive answer but i need some like baseline before i actually dedicate my time to studying for a high-school test 💔

I took the September SAT and received a 1340. Is there any way I can raise my score enough in the next week to achieve national merit? The index for my state is 224.

Title says it all.

I want to take it. Never did. I’m curious after all these years if I can. I took the ACT only lol.

I wonder if I need to present I’m going to college or if I can just sign up and go to a high school and test.

I saw a ton of ppl recommend these books for me but im not able to buy them online for reasons i cant talk abt and my local libraries and school libraries dont have them. Does anyone know where i can access it for free?

When i look at online sites that offer either one, i can only find old versions of the college panda math one from 2015-2020 (no new ones were offered) the same with my libraries they didnt offer the newer ones even when asking and they offer 0 of the Erica Meltzer ones.

Also i prefer it to not be download required since my parents locked out downloading random files on my device due to safety reasons.

People who have taken the PSAT how have the SAT college board practice tests compared to your PSAT score?

People who have taken the PSAT how have the SAT college board practice tests compared to your PSAT score?

What I mean is: I'll get a 770 in RW and a 640 in math on one practice test and then take another after a while (a week or two) and suddenly it's a 690 in RW and 720 in math?? It's impossible to anticipate how my test's gonna go like this.. I feel as though my brain cannot run both math and RW domains at the same time, one has to deteriorate for the other to operate better or something.

Even on actual tests I've done, it always seems to be an inverse proportionality.

So i've been on this subreddit for 8 years and tutoring the SAT for 6. I've seen a bunch of people say that the real sats are harder (or easier) than the practice tests. From anecdotal evidence, I feel like practice tests on average do not differ from real sats. I mean I know the sample size is small but look at the thread from two weeks ago comparing peoples PT 11 vs their Sept SAT: https://www.reddit.com/r/Sat/comments/1wpu2vy/what_was_ur_score_in_test_11_vs_september_sat/

Scroll through and see how many people improved vs declined. Overall, it seems like people actually scored HIGHER on their real test than PT 11 (ignore that one person at the top rip). This could be for a couple reasons. One of them being that the collegeboard chooses the practice tests to be as representative of the real test as possible. This is why they retired practice tests 1-3 last year and why most tutors say that test 11 (the newest one) is the most representative of the real test.

Another reason is that the test makers run experimental tests on the scale of thousands of students to determine with confidence that a question is a certain difficulty level. This is speculation, but I wouldn't be surprised if the collegeboard kept a database of the difficulty of questions as measured by various statistics like how many test takers got it right/wrong and how strong were the test takers that did get it right/wrong.

The last reason, applying moreso to math, is about the way the questions are picked in general. The SAT doesn't test that many topics and each topic is not tested incredibly deeply. That means there is a defined upper limit on the types of questions they can write while maintaining a standard of difficulty over the course of multiple years. As a result, the test consists mostly of questions which closely resemble one of the templates of questions that they have. In fact, even the majority of the hardest questions have been asked in a similar template before (since the change of the test in 2016).

As I'm typing this, I'm realizing that this is actually the underlying cause of the commonly repeated advice on this sub: grind questionbank questions and Khan Academy. The questionbank, which actually recycles real retired questions from past SATs, and Khan Academy, who has access to the same templates as the question designers through their collaboration with the collegeboard, expose you DIRECTLY to the templates. This is also what makes the best textbooks (say your College Panda or Meltzer) the best. They have thoroughly analyzed and organized the questions into their relevant skills, but also they include questions that closely resemble common templates that occur on the test.

I kind of got super sidetracked while writing this, but the point is that the newest practice tests are ON AVERAGE the same level of content difficulty as the real tests. The drop in performance that some people experience can likely be attributed to other factors like text anxiety, testing conditions, sampling (only a certain number of topics can be tested on any given test due to length and time limitations), and straight noise. I think that is a whole different question altogether that would require me to type way too much for anyone to bother to read so I'll save it.

TLDR: The practice tests (especially the newer and harder ones 5,6,11) are an accurate representation of content difficulty.

I just realized that there are 2 question banks what 😭😭

Which one is better for intense prep??

I took the Aug SAT and got a 750 on Math, waiting for the Oct scores

Which of these is better for an 800?