The May 2008 SAT

Our Report

The Princeton Review carefully monitors every SAT so that we can provide our students with the most up-to-date guidance and information on the test.  Here's what we saw.

Note: You may have seen a different arrangement on your test.  There was definitely at least one other test code, form AEEC, that had a different experimental section and order of sections overall.  On that test, the experimental appears to have been Section 3.

Math Highlights

There didn’t seem to be a ton of medium questions on this test.  Most of the questions were either fairly straightforward or really hard, with very little middle ground.  What does that mean for you as a test taker?  Personal order of difficulty, POOD!  Remember, #18 is only hard because most of the students who answer it get it wrong.  But guess what? Most students who get it wrong haven’t taken The Princeton Review and don’t know about wonderful techniques like Plugging In, PITA, and Ballparking.

Reading Highlights

The vocabulary on this test was pretty tough at spots.  However, if you were diligent about studying your Hit Parade, you would have been sitting pretty on the following words: quarantine, plethora, obfuscate, exacerbate, tenacity, paucity, concur, bellicose, convoluted, veneration, and pervasive.  Quite a few points could’ve been earned by learning a few words. 

The Critical Reading passages were blessedly straightforward and the questions mostly tested whether you got the general idea of the passage.  For instance, the passage about the young girl going to boarding school should have been really easy to understand, and many of the questions tested whether you got the point that she was developing into a confident young woman.  If you have trouble understanding characterization, pay close attention to descriptive language.  Ask yourself, “What kind of words does the author use to describe that person?”  It’s all about adjectives and diction here.

The passage towards the end of the test on the nature of Sublimity was a bit dense, so make sure you’re not exhausted by the time you get to Section Eight.  Build up your stamina by practicing with full-length tests.

Writing Highlights

The experimental section on the last few tests has been the Writing section, so keep an eye out for any test with two 35 minute grammar sections.  We saw more of the same here in the Writing section.  The Error ID questions follow a pretty consistent Order of Difficulty, with later questions testing more esoteric errors.  As a trend, we typically see parallelism and verb errors show up on easier questions and pronoun and faulty comparison questions on harder ones.  Study those rules.  Also, remember to keep an eye on your “No Error” answers.  They typically represent about 20% of the correct answers on the section.