Parents of high schoolers frequently ask me when the best time is to begin planning for college. My answer is usually “now!” which often, and more importantly, leads to...
Two years ago, when College Board announced that the new Digital SAT would abandon dreaded long-passage reading comprehension questions in favor of a shorter, quicker, mixed verbal section, thousands of high school sophomores and juniors breathed a collective sigh of relief. Six paragraph science passages, plot-free fictional excerpts, and paired historical texts with flowery opaque language would all be retired with few lamenting their absence from the new exam. After all, these new passages were going to be easy! One and done! How could it possibly be difficult to guess the main idea of a five-line passage?
Digital SAT Reading question Challenges
While the new reading and writing questions are indeed much shorter, they are often quite nuanced and may require a second (or third) read-through in order to fully understand what the test writers are asking you to do. Inference questions, for example, can be particularly tricky (a concern I've heard repeatedly from a number of students, particularly when dealing with science passages). New styles of writing that didn't appear on the previous SAT, such as lines of poetry or summaries of notes, also create new unanticipated challenges. And, to make matters worse, since the Digital SAT is still a relatively new exam, for many students, there simply aren't enough viable practice questions. While it's true that quite a few questions are available through the College Board's Question Bank, or Khan Academy, and in the case of College Board, many of the questions could easily show up on the actual practice tests and artificially inflate your score (although you can filter these out).
MAster SAT Reading with GRE Practice Problems
What if some of the best SAT prep out there has nothing to do with the SAT at all?
There's a free online resource with practically unlimited, challenging questions that can supplement any SAT study course, and do so effectively - GRE Prep Club. Sign up for a free account (takes a second), go to the top navigation bar, select “Tests” then “GRE Question Banks: NEW” from the drop-down menu (or just go to this page right here). You're not likely to hear about this resource from most SAT test takers or test prep firms out there, simply because it's for the GRE exam (that's the one for students applying to graduate school) Don't be intimidated, though – through just a little bit of curation, you can find a litany of reading comprehension questions to test exactly the same skills as those evaluated by the SAT. The site can feel a bit overwhelming at first (since you're not going to need most of the material on there), but you can follow these rules to use it effectively.
- The content most relevant to the SAT will be the reading comprehension questions.
- In the searchable question banks, you can choose a difficulty level. A mix of easy and medium questions is fine – but feel free to choose the hard ones as well if you're looking for a challenge.
- Select “medium reading” – these are basically short passages; there aren't any long passages on the SAT anymore
- Mix it up a bit. You can see a sample selection from the GRE question bank below
- At the very bottom of the page, click Search. That will take you to a filtered (but extensive!) list of questions you can try with results similar to these:
- Click on a question and give it a go! Most of the questions will have some discussion (often by GRE test prep experts - including some from MyGuru!), so you can scroll down and see the different strategies to find some that work for you.
- Just remember that the GRE is NOT the SAT. It's a completely different test and is created by a completely different company. Test styles and question types will often be different (for example – there are no multiple answer questions on the SAT) The most reliable questions will always be from the College Board, since they're the actual test writers. But if you're looking for an effective, challenging complement to your typical SAT review materials, why not take yourself to graduate school? After all, you may end up there soon enough anyway!