Tips for Taking the New Digital SAT®

Is Your Teen Taking the SAT® Soon? Here Are Some Tips for Test Day! Sylvan’s Test Prep experts put together a few tips and strategies to help your teen confidently tackle this exam and achieve their desired scores! 

1. Know the Instructions: Familiarize yourself with each section's instructions beforehand to save time during the exam. Read the SAT instructions here.  
2. Don't Leave Blanks: There's no penalty for wrong answers, so answer every question, even if you have to guess. 
3. Prioritize Efficiency: Answer the questions you know first and leave challenging ones for later. This prevents time constraints from hindering answering easier questions. 
4. Pace Yourself: Don't get bogged down on a single question. Move on and revisit it later if time permits. 
5. Eliminate Options: Use process of elimination to narrow down answer choices, increasing your guessing accuracy. 
6. Focus on the Question: Understand what the question is truly asking before seeking the answer. 
7. Mark it Up: Highlight key points in questions and eliminate answer choices to improve focus and manage time effectively. This can easily be done on a paper test or using annotation tools on a digital test. 
8. Review and Reflect: If time allows, revisit challenging questions after completing each section. 
9. Familiarize yourself with the new Digital Tools: They have some new built-in tools, including:

• • A way to flag questions in order to come back to them later
  • A countdown clock, which students can choose to show or hide at the top of their testing screen, that will alert them when they’re running out of time
  • A built-in graphing calculator students can use on the entire math section (or they can bring their own calculator)
  • A reference sheet, for each math question, consisting of common formulas

 For a full run down of the digital SAT, click here!