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?
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).
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.