About the Course

The SAT is a college-readiness assessment tool recognized and accepted by U.S. colleges and universities. Divided into four subject areas: reading, writing and language, math, and an optional essay, the exam includes a mix of questions types, including multiple choice and student produced answers. There is NO penalty for WRONG answers. The SAT consists of timed sections totaling THREE hours. The optional essay adds 50 minutes, for a total of three hours and 50 minutes. Some students electing NOT to take the essay may have an unsored section of the test. College Board schedules the SAT approximately SEVEN times a year in the U.S. and four times a year at international locations between August and June.

SAT: Reading

The reading sections of the SAT require you to read passages to assess your vocabulary, measure your reading comprehension, and evaluate your understanding of literary expression, style, and strategy. Within each passage, you'll be asked to identify meaning, allegory, structure, tone, point of view and context. You'll also need to be able to distinguish between metaphors and similes, allusion and illusion, themes and motifs, symbolism and imagery or connotation and denotation. Our critical reading lessons help you practice comprehension and analysis skills, review literary devices and explain the different components of a piece of literature.

SAT: Writing and Language

The writing portion of the SAT consists of 44 multiple choice questions. You'll need to find a main idea, thesis statement, identify an audience, and determine correct paragraph structure. Topics covered include logos, ethos and pathos, opposition, appeal, logical fallacies, rhetoric, reasoning, transition, sentence structure, word choice and clarity. You'll also be tested on punctuation (including the use of commas, semicolons, colons and sentence-ending punctuation), grammar (such as subject-verb agreements, personal and possessive pronouns, clauses, modifiers, parallelism and run-on sentences), and style (encompassing strategy, comparative and superlative adjectives, phrasal verbs, tone and voice). You can use our lessons to review and practice grammar and also to learn about essay structure and writing strategies.

SAT: Mathematics

The 58 questions and tasks in the math section include both multiple-choice and problem-solving numerical and story problems. You'll be asked about fractions, radical numbers, common factors and multiples, ratios, percent and numerical sequences. You'll use logic and critical-thinking skills to calculate linear equations, find an absolute value, multiply binomials, define negative exponents and compute rational expressions. Geometric math problems include graphing, finding absolute values of shapes and angles, and determining distances using theory and formulas. Statistical and data analysis questions test your knowledge of probability, permutation, factorials and geometric sequences. Our lessons cover all of the math you need to know for the SAT and include multiple choice practice questions so you can practice.

SAT: Essay

Disclaimer: College Board is no longer offering the SAT Essay.

The essay is optional on the SAT. so students do not need to elect to write the essay although some schools may ask for it during the admissions process. Students have 50 minutes to complete the essay section, which includes reading a passage. Students will need to analyze the passage and use evidence from the passage to support their position in the essay. Students electing to take the SAT including the essay section will pay a slightly higher fee when registering.