Reading and Writing

The new reading and writing section was significantly different from the previous paper SAT in both the style of the passages and the questions. The current digital version has one question per passage, which has benefits and drawbacks. The benefits are that the passages are now shorter and more focused, reducing the amount of reading drastically but simultaneously demanding quick comprehension and sharp analysis of the text. However, the short passages may induce challenges since there would be little room for error and extremely limited context so your understanding could only be deduced from the short blurb.

Reading

There are two types of questions on the DSAT reading and writing section, the reading comprehension section and the grammar section. I will talk about the reading comprehension section first.

The first step towards mastering reading comprehension was mastering the new format, the shorter passages forced me to avoid getting lost in unnecessary details. The tricky part, however, is to still comprehend the main idea and purpose of the text quickly. It was essential for me to skim the passages for key points, such as the thesis, its warrants, and conclusion while ignoring fluff. This allowed me to zero in on the information most relevant to the question at hand.

Another step that I took, which is a strategy supercharged by the new digital format of the SAT, was to read the question first before reading the passage. Understanding the question first allows you to look at the passage through a filtered lens, zooming in on the necessary information to crack the question while blurring out unnecessary details that only slow you down.

The first two steps account for the majority of the reading comprehension questions, with two exceptions, the vocabulary part and the most difficult reading comprehension questions (which often range from questions 13 to 15 on the second module). Due to my previous experiences with other forms of standardized testing, I had a large vocabulary which allowed me to breeze through those sections without much struggle. But on the reading comprehension, most of the struggle appeared, those questions are the ones that force you to digest a difficult piece of nonfiction literature either on a scientific experiment or the history of a work. Both of which use terminology and names that you have never heard before and have purposefully misleading or trick answer choices. My strategy for those questions was two-fold. The first was to take note (on the scratch sheet of paper provided) of the basic relationships between subjects and the chronological order of events. The second step was to not look for "correct" answer choices but rather to eliminate all of the wrong answer choices. The second step is important to avoid the trick answers which often match the one that you formulated in your mind while reading the passage while also containing a piece of information that is either not supported by the passage or just simply false. This means that even if the last answer choice seems unintuitive if it is the only one that is factually correct, it must be the correct answer choice.

Grammar

Grammar was something that I struggled with at the beginning of my SAT journey because of the amount of concepts I needed to learn. This was especially difficult for me because at first, I was using the strategy of "what sounds right" in the sentence without understanding much of the grammatical explanation of the correct choice. This often leads to me choosing the purposefully misleading choice while skipping right over the correct one. But with practice, I developed several strategies to help me keep pace while also avoiding lots of mistakes.

The first strategy was to find the outlier. On every question in the SAT, there can only be one right answer. The answer is most likely different from the others and stands out. So on a subject-verb agreement question, if it is apparent that every other verb is plural but only one of them is singular, I would choose the outlier (the singular verb) and move on to the next with confidence.

The second strategy is elimination. There are lots of words/punctuation that are grammatically identical. The most common example is between the period and the semicolon, both of which are used to separate two independent clauses. This is why on test day if I see that both a semicolon and a period are both answer choices, I can confidently eliminate them both since they cannot be both correct at the same time and therefore they must be both wrong.

However, there are also many more concepts that I needed to review even with those strategies in place, such as parallelism, common usage, and subject-verb agreement.

Writing

Coming in the last part of the reading and writing section, writing is a section that is both evidently simple or completely confusing. There are two main forms of writing questions, transition words and list questions.

Transition words are often easier, I just have to identify the relationship between the sentences that the transition word connects. The SAT only has a very limited amount of transition words available. Words like though, however, and by contrast indicate a difference or disagreement between two sentences. While words like likewise and similarly are used to juxtapose two sentences that are roughly the same. Once I understood that transition words are simply an indication of the relationship between two sentences, those questions became increasingly easy.

The list questions are slightly more difficult because of the numerous formats and types they have. The easiest type of question is the one that asks you to emphasize a difference or a similarity between two things mentioned in the list. Those are the simplest because there is often only one choice that does what the question wants. These questions also do not require you to read the list.

The more difficult variations want you to introduce something or summarize the list. Those require you to understand and read the list. The trick that I had was to make sure the object of the question was the subject of the correct answer choice. If the question asks you to introduce a show, the show must be the subject of the correct answer choice.

Timing Tip

For me, because the grammar, writing, and vocabulary sections of the test are easier for me, the order in which I take the test is often vocabulary questions first, then skip to grammar questions (often question 15), finish questions 15-27, then do the reading comprehension questions last because those are the most time-consuming. The most important tip that I have learned is to not rush the processes since that often leads to easily avoidable mistakes that drag my points down.

Math

The most important thing in the math section is the new addition of the Desmos calculator. If utilized correctly, Desmos can almost solve every single problem while saving you lots of time on it. Something that I spent lots of time on was familiarizing myself with Desmos and just learning to use all of its functions.

The other biggest issue was to make sure that I did not make simple arithmetic mistakes that cost me easy points on the first module or the easier questions on the second module. To make sure that the only thing I had to tackle was the last problems on the second module (frequently questions 17-22) to earn the most amount of points.

Time management in the math section was much easier due to the time-and-question ratio. The trick is to not rush the easier questions and make mistakes that lose easy points but to get through those at a reasonable speed and save the majority of the time for the most difficult, last questions on the math section.