SAT exam for US college
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- Last Updated: Saturday, 10 July 2021 08:40
- Published: Saturday, 15 August 2020 03:56
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SAT = Scholastic Aptitude Test
SAT is a standardized test used by most colleges in USA for undergraduate admission in any department. If you want to apply to any college in USA, your chances of getting accepted are greatly improved if you have a high score in SAT. However, SAT is just one component. Your GPA in school, and recommendation from your high school teachers carry lot more value than SAT scores, typically for high ranked colleges. More info here on wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAT
Your kid will be taking the SAT exam in his high school, if he wants to attend a college after his high school. some colleges don't require SAT at all, while most colleges accept either ACT or SAT exam (both are of similar difficulty).
SAT is a 3 hour long exam, and has four sections: Reading, Writing and Language, Math (no calculator), and Math (calculator allowed). The optinal essay writing 5th section is not really required. The total score possible is 1600 (400 from Reading, 400 from Writing and Language, and 800 from Maths)
1. Reading: It has one section with 52 multiple-choice questions and a time limit of 65 minutes. There are 5 passages to read, and then answer 10-11 questions related to the passage. The passages are from 4 different fields, and do not require any prior knowledge, except the ability to read and infer correctly.
2. Writing and Language: It has one section with 44 multiple-choice questions and a time limit of 35 minutes. Not sure how many passages are supposed to be there, but I've seen 4 passages with 11 questions in each. The passages here are similar to ones in Reading section, but they focus more or writing side, i.e suggest corrections, punctuations, improving sentence structure, etc.
3. Maths: Maths portion is divided in 2 sections. It has total 58 questions (45 are multiple choice, while 13 require you to write an answer) and a time limit of 80 minutes.
- The Math Test – No Calculator section has 20 questions (15 multiple choice and 5 grid-in) and lasts 25 minutes.
- The Math Test – Calculator section has 38 questions (30 multiple choice and 8 grid-in) and lasts 55 minutes.
There are many sample papers in link below in Resources. One such sample paper is here: SAT_practise.pdf
Percentile performance:
Depending on the score, you will get a percentile score, and that decides how well you performed. The avg score for SAT is 1060 out of 1600. A score of over 1500 out of 1600 is considered very good, and will place you in top 98% - 99% of the kids who took the test nationally. The wiki link, shows what your percentile scores are for different scores. Just over 2.2M students took SAT from the class of 2019. That means high school students who are graduating in 2019, took the SAT test anytime in 2017, 2018, 2019, etc, but the total number was 2.2M. Most students take SAT test in 11th grade (since 12th grade gets too busy applying for colleges). Since number of high school kids is about 18M as seen in section "USA basic facts", that means there are about 4M kids graduating every year from high school. So, out of these, more than half end up taking SAT exam, and these are the students who are serious about going to college. A significant portion of students who take SAT exam apply for colleges. Even then, note that only 30% of US workforce is comprised of people with 4 year college degree, so even though about 50% of the students take exam, only half of these kids end up completing the 4 year college and get a degree, rest end up dropping out from college.
Resource:
1. college board: SAT is wholly owned by collegeboard.org, which is a non profit. It has a lot of free resource, sample papers to help you practice for the exam.
https://collegereadiness.collegeboard.org/sat/practice/full-length-practice-tests
2. Khan Academy: This is a wonderful resource for SAT, and I don't see a reason as to why you will ever want to get paid services for SAT preparation. In fact, starting 2015, college board has partnered with Khan Academy to provide free SAT preparation. Here's a link to get started:
https://www.khanacademy.org/mission/sat
3. mometrix: A guy named George sent me an email with the link to the website www.mometrix.com, and I really liked the free sample papers available on this website. Thanks George for the contribution !! I've included the link below. It has free sample papers for all 3 subjects.
https://www.mometrix.com/academy/sat-practice-test/
I'll keep adding more links as I find them .....