The November 3, 2007 SAT

Our Report

As you may know, The Princeton Review carefully monitors every SAT so that we can provide students with the most up-to-date guidance and information. We thought you might be interested in what we observed about this SAT administration. We have detailed information about one form code administered on November 3, 2007: AEDF.

Writing Highlights

The test included several agreement errors, including verb tense, number agreement, and subject/object errors. It had many misplaced modifier questions and some incorrect prepositions. Unlike recent exams, it had only one parallelism question. In addition, the order of difficulty was not obvious in this section; many of the later questions were not harder than the earlier ones. The Essay seen by our test takers asked whether having too many options is something that makes people happy.

Reading Highlights

Responses from test takers on the November test reflected our hit parade and other materials well. On sentence completions, most clues were easy to spot, and students could use “good/bad” to eliminate answer choices on a number of questions. Most sentences were not convoluted in structure—they led well to coming up with your own word for the blank. Test takers did not notice any pure two-blank relationship questions—with two blanks, you could always find a strong clue for the meaning of at least one blank, and usually both.

Both the short and long passages seemed business as usual, though some of them may have been painful for students and/or yawn inducing. A long passage about a choreographer looking back on her college days and her early artistic revelations may have turned students off due to its heady language—though the questions themselves, were not that hard. This seems to follow the trend of tough passages with easy questions or vice versa that we have seen at times in the past. A long passage about Socrates may have also been painful. The last passage about imaginary and real monsters was almost fun. The questions were not hard, and it was easy to skim for main ideas. The dual passage on genetically modified crops was not very hard. A few of the questions relating Passage 1 to Passage 2 were a little tricky. Other passage topics included a dual reading on a Zen approach to life, a child reminiscing about his Indian parents, a short dual on reality television, a cool guy on a Native American reservation, and the function of fur coloring for mammals.

Math Highlights

Princeton Review students should have felt the math sections were pretty typical but with a handful of unusual math problems—not necessarily harder, but a little different in presentation. Plugging In and PITA worked on quite a few problems (PITA more often). The typical question forms appeared: averages, absolute value, counting combinations, geometric series, one direct variation question, and two questions about perpendicular vs. parallel lines. There were no reports of seeing questions on inverse variation or graph transformation. There were several coordinate geometry and regular geometry questions as is usual including a question involving polygons and a Roman numeral question with similar triangles. Some challenging problems included: probability, charts involving f(x) and g(x), slope, average problems, decimal truncation (unusual), number lines with closed and open circles, and a logical deduction word problem. There were also a few diagrams that were “not drawn to scale”—so ballparking could have been used to knock out a few choices here and there. On this test, it was hard to trust the pictures.