Scholastic Assessment Test (SAT)
General Information
- A standardized college admissions test in the US run by the College Board, a non-profit that also administers the PSAT and the AP (Advanced Placement) program.
- The SAT shows schools how prepared a student is for college by measuring key skills like reading comprehension, computational ability, and clarity of expression. All four year colleges in the US accept the SAT.
- In most part of the test, students will answer multiple-choice questions. Each question offers 4 answering options (latest update)
- All 4-year colleges and universities in the US accept the SAT. SAT score can account for as much as 50% of the admission decision.
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Who should take SAT?
The test is intended to assess students’ readiness for college and reflect on students’ performance in high school.
- Students planning to study at a higher education institution for Undergraduate and Graduate courses (optional)
- Scholarship and certification candidates
How is the test conducted?
- SAT test consists of 3 main sections which are Critical Reading, Math and Writing. Unlike ACT, SAT does not have a dedicated testing part for Science subjects.
- A SAT test can take up approximately 4.30 hours.
- The questions range from easy, medium, and hard depending on the scoring from the experimental sections. Students are expected to encounter some extra questions in the Experimental sections that do not count forward their scores.
Topic Areas | Critical Reading (65 minutes) | Math (80 minutes) | Writing |
| Sections | 2 25-min sections 1 20-min section | 55-min sections (Calculator) 25-min section (No calculator) | 1 25-min essay/ 1 25-min section 1 10-min section |
Total number of questions | 48 Passage-Based 19 Sentence Completions | 45 Multiple Choice (4 options) 13 Grid-Ins (Free response) | 25 Improving Sentences 18 Identifying Sentence Errors 6 Improving Paragraphs |
How is SAT scored?
- Each section receives a score on the scale of 200–800. All scores are multiples of 10. Total scores are calculated by adding up scores of the three sections.
- Students can earn from 400 points to a total of 1600 possible points on the Redesigned SAT (updated in 2017)
- Each year, College Board will release a new Equating Score System which helps the students convert their Raw Scores into a Scaled Score. Raw Scores are accounted for the number of correct answers a student gets from the test. From a certain Raw Score, it can be converted to a final Scaled Score produced by 3 main test sections.