SAT / ACT Prep Online Guides and Tips

The SAT Reading and Writing section presents you with a challenge. Now that the digital SAT has been rolled out, this section contains over 50 passages you'll need to read and answer questions on! The passages will come from a wide variety of sources and test you on everything from critical reading to grammar.

How can you attack these passages to get a high SAT Reading and Writing score? This guide will discuss the best strategies for reading the SAT passages for each question type you'll see.

You've likely heard that the SAT is digital now. This has created a lot of changes: students will take the exam on the computer, the digital SAT is shorter, and scores are returned much faster. There are also big changes to the SAT Reading and Writing section, and one of the biggest is how many passages in SAT Reading and Writing there now are.

You may have heard there are now a lot more passages to read, but the good news is that most students will find them much more manageable! Read this guide to learn how many passages are in the SAT Reading and Writing section, how they're different from those in the old SAT, what they look like, and the best way to tackle them on the exam.

SAT Essay writing requires a very specific set of skills. It's a little daunting to think that you only have 50 minutes to read a passage, analyze it, and then write an essay. But don't worry—getting a top SAT essay score is within everyone's reach! The most reliable way to score high is to follow our SAT essay template for every essay and to prepare well beforehand.

In this article, we'll show you how to write a great SAT essay. We'll take you through all the steps you need to follow when writing the SAT essay to show you how you can put together a killer essay yourself.

On every SAT Essay, you'll have to read an argument meant to persuade a broad audience and discuss how well the author argues his or her point. The passage you'll have to read will change from test to test, but you'll always need to analyze the author's argument and write a coherent and organized essay explaining this analysis.

In this article, we've compiled a list of the 14 real SAT essay prompts that the College Board has released (either in The Official SAT Study Guide or separately online) for the new SAT. This is the most comprehensive set of new SAT essay prompts online today.

At the end of this article, we'll also guide you through how to get the most out of these prompts and link to our expert resources on acing the SAT essay. I'll discuss how the SAT essay prompts are valuable not just because they give you a chance to write a practice essay, but because of what they reveal about the essay task itself.

Whether you've never written an SAT Essay or didn't get the score you wanted on your last test, you can benefit from knowing more: both about the essay itself, and what really matters when the graders are reading your essay.

To introduce you to what you'll have to do, we've gathered up these 15 tips to master the SAT essay. If you can reliably follow all these points, you'll be able to get at least a 6/6/6 on the SAT essay—guaranteed.

The SAT Essay is scored separately from the rest of the SAT now, thanks to the changes that went into effect in March 2016.

While the essay is now optional (you don't automatically have to take it every time you take the SAT), some colleges still require students to submit SAT essay scores with their applications. Learning how to consistently write a perfect SAT essay will be a huge boost to your application to these schools.

In this article, we'll discuss what it takes to get a perfect 8/8/8 on the SAT essay and what you need to do to train yourself to get this top score.

Aside from the “grid in” math questions, all you have to do for most of the SAT is answer multiple choice questions.

And then, if you've chosen to take it, there's the essay. Or, more accurately, "To finish up, there's the essay." Because the last thing you'll do on the SAT (with Essay) is read a passage and write an essay analyzing its argument, all in 50 minutes.

How can you even begin to read a passage, analyze it, and write an essay about it in 50 minutes? What SAT essay structure should you follow? Is there an SAT essay format that’ll score you a top score for sure? Read on to find out the answers to these questions!

There's a persistent myth about the SAT Essay: the idea that you can't prepare content because you don't see the prompt until the day of the test. This is a myth because, in order to be standardized, the test has to require the same complexity of argument in every SAT essay question: yes or no, this or that, what causes what.

And since all these arguments are very simple, almost every SAT essay argument can be boiled down to one of the 6 we list here. In addition to that, though, we also explain how to argue each one, and give you sample support for both sides of every argument. Read on for the inside scoop on this important aspect of the SAT.

One of the best ways to learn the SAT essay is to look at example submissions by other real students.  By judging these example essays yourself, you'll understand much better what SAT graders are looking for.  You'll also learn from these examples what to do and not to do.

The CollegeBoard has once again completely revamped the SAT — the changes debuted in March 2016 (tests can have debuts right? Right). We have an overview about all of the changes that have been made, but how do the changes apply to the SAT essay questions in particular? Read on to find out more about the new SAT Writing prompts.

True or False: Since essay length is not mentioned in the SAT essay grading rubric, it doesn’t matter how much you write in your essay.

Answer: True...but also false. Read on for an explanation of why and how the length of your SAT essay can affect your score.

Have you ever wondered what the SAT is looking for when they ask questions that are confusing? Look no further! In this post, we reveal the goals of the SAT Essay and Identifying Sentence Errors question types.

SAT Essay scoring can be tricky to figure out. Maybe you've already created target goals for your SAT score, following our guide, so you at least have that score goal set.

But where does your essay score fit into all this? What is a good SAT essay score? This article will answer those questions.

Note: The information in this article is for the old (pre-March-2016) SAT essay, which was scored out of 12 and part of the Writing section. Scores for the March 2016 SAT were only released May 10th, 2016, which means that data on percentiles and averages aren't going to be available for a while yet. We'll update this article as soon as the information comes out.

If you've spent any time doing SAT prep, you probably are familiar with what it’s like to write an SAT essay. But what’s it like to be an SAT essay grader? Find out what essay graders look for, what the essay grading job involves, and effective SAT essay tips you should use as a result of this information as I bring you...insights from real SAT essay graders.

Note: The information in this article is for the old (pre-March-2016) SAT essay, which was scored out of 12 and part of the Writing section. Because the new SAT essay has been administered (and graded) so few times, there's not much information out there yet about the grading process for the new essay. We'll update this article as soon as the information comes out.

Creating your own essay skeleton can go a long way towards helping you prepare for the SAT or ACT essay. Having an essay template ready to go before you take the test can reduce feelings of panic, since it allows you to control at least some of the unknowns of a free-response question. It can even be helpful to look at other people’s essay skeletons to get an idea what your own essay template should look like.

But when does using an essay skeleton go from a great idea to a huge mistake? Keep reading to find out.