For success on the SAT, students need to know what to expect on the ELA section and prepare accordingly. In this article, we’re taking a closer look at the structure of the Digital SAT Reading and Writing test and identifying the subjects and skills it tests students on.
The Digital SAT Reading and Writing Test
Students have 64 minutes to answer 54 ELA questions on the SAT Reading and Writing portion. The test is divided into two modules: one that is largely the same for everyone, and one that is adapted to the student’s performance on module 1. Each question on this test includes a short, paragraph-length passage and four answer choices. The passages represent four subject areas: literature, science, the humanities, and history/social studies.
Note that the SAT underwent a dramatic transformation in 2024 that brought the SAT into digital devices, among many other changes.
There are major differences between English questions on the old SAT and on the new Digital SAT.
- Passages: The old SAT had 9 passages spread across two English sections. They were approximately 500-750 words long, and 10-11 questions would refer back to them. On the new Digital SAT, there are no longer any traditional passages; instead, each question has an individual mini-passage that is approximately 25-150 words long.
- Sections: English questions on the old SAT were divided into two sections: the Reading Test, which tested students on vocabulary, analysis, and reading comprehension, and the Writing and Language Test, which tested students on grammar, organization, and rhetorical tools. The new digital SAT has only one test, the ‘Reading and Writing Test’ which is split into two modules that test the same skills, though at different difficulty levels.
- Testing Strategy: On the old SAT, all students testing on a particular day saw the exact same test. The new digital SAT is adaptive, meaning that the test changes depending on how students perform on it. In this case, how students do on the first module of the Reading and Writing Test determines which of two modules they’ll get as their second module: an easy one or a hard one.
- Length: All around, the new digital SAT English section is shorter than it was on the old SAT. The old SAT Reading Test contained 52 questions that students had 65 minutes to complete. The Writing and Language Test had 44 questions with a time limit of 35 minutes. This means in all, the test gave students 100 minutes to answer a total of 96 questions. In contrast, each module of the new digital SAT has 27 questions that students have 32 minutes to answer, for a total of 54 questions in 64 minutes. Not only is the new Digital SAT shorter, but students will also have more time per question.
What does the SAT Reading and Writing Test cover?
Questions on the SAT Reading and Writing Test fall into four broad categories: 1) Craft and Structure, 2) Information and Ideas, 3) Standard English Conventions, and 4) Expression of Ideas.
These categories don’t only serve to describe the distribution of questions across the test, but also function as a roadmap of the test. Unlike the SAT Math test, the Reading and Writing Test groups question types together and always asks them in the same order. It begins with Craft and Structure, followed by Information and Ideas, then Standard English Conventions, and finally ends with Expression of Ideas.
Craft and Structure
The first type of question students will encounter on the test are Craft and Structure questions. Across the whole test, you’ll encounter about 13-15 of these questions, which means about 6-8 per section. They account for roughly 28% of all questions on the Reading and Writing Test, which means that out of the four categories, students will likely see the most Craft and Structure questions. Luckily, due to its large number of vocabulary questions, this section often takes the shortest amount of time for students to actually complete.
Like the category name implies, these questions tend to focus on the craft of writing, asking students to consider how a text is structured, the purpose of individual sentences within a text, the author’s overall purpose in writing the text, and how one text might relate to a different text on the same topic. This is also where students will encounter vocabulary questions.
Let’s look at an example of a question in the Craft and Structure section of the SAT Reading and Writing Test:
This is an example of a “Words in Context” question. Unlike previous iterations of the SAT which tested high-level vocabulary words, the current SAT is less concerned with the difficulty of the word itself—as can be seen by the answer options in the example question, “enhance,” “hinder,” “misrepresent,” and “aggravate” are all words that most 11th graders will be familiar with–and more concerned with students being able to select the correct word based on context clues provided in the sentence.
Like all questions on the SAT English test, Words in Context questions will provide students with a mini-passage that is 25-50 words long, and typically 1-2 sentences in length.
Each passage always includes context clues that will help direct students to the correct answer. For example, here we know that critics’ belief “that customers would never agree to pay to pick their own produce on farms” didn’t greatly affect Booker T. Whatley’s implementation of the idea, since these farms “can be found throughout the United States.” This means that we are looking for an answer that (following “didn’t”) is synonymous with “didn’t affect.” Of these options, “hinder” is the closest and the correct answer.
Information and Ideas
After the Craft and Structure section, students will encounter the Information and Ideas questions. There will be 12-14 of these questions across a whole Reading and Writing Test, which means about 6-7 per module. These questions make up roughly 26% of the Reading and Writing Test.
There are two main focuses of Information and Ideas questions: reading comprehension and logical reasoning. In this section, students will often be presented with a short informational passage or a brief excerpt from a piece of literature and asked to identify the main idea of the passage or a specific detail from the text.
Let’s look at an example of a reading comprehension question that utilizes a passage from a piece of literature:
When an SAT English test question excerpts a piece of literature, be it a poem, a play, a short story, or, as in this case, a novel, the question will always begin with a sentence or two of context. At a minimum, this context will include the text from which the passage was excerpted (in this case, The Call of the Wild), the author of the text (Jack London), and the date the text was published (1903). If it is required to make sense of the small excerpt, the question might also include a brief summary of characters and plot (“Buck is a sled dog living with John Thornton in Yukon, Canada”).
This particular text was written in 1903, which is common for the SAT: all literary excerpts will be at least 100 years old. This means that these texts might be a little difficult to students who are unused to more formal, antiquated language and sentence structures.
The other skill tested in Information and Ideas questions is logical reasoning. In “Command of evidence” questions, students will have to use inductive reasoning in order to identify a piece of evidence that best supports a claim, and in “Inference” questions, they will have to use deductive reasoning to identify a logical conclusion to certain pieces of evidence.
Let’s look an example of a Command of Evidence question (right):
It might look as though we’ve stumbled into the science section of the ACT, but this is actually a common form of Command of Evidence questions—in this case, the command of quantitative evidence. With these questions, students will be given a chart of some kind (likely a line or bar graph or a table), a paragraph of context that includes some claim, and they will have to identify a piece of data from the chart that best supports the claim.
There are a few things to watch out for with these kinds of questions. Most importantly, students shouldn’t be overwhelmed by the complexity of the chart or technicality of the language used in the passage. These questions are specifically designed to overwhelm with information. Instead of letting that happen, students should keep calm and simply discount unnecessary information. Pay attention only to the claim being made and the data that relates to it! Students should also double check that the answer they select correctly reproduces data from the chart, since some answers will seem to support the claim but will present incorrect data.
The Reading and Writing Test also asks questions that test command of textual evidence. With these questions, there will be a passage in which a claim is made and students will have to select the answer that best supports that claim. Students will also see Inference questions, where they will see a passage that contains 2-3 pieces of evidence, and they will have to select the most logical conclusion based on that evidence.
Standard English Conventions
Standard English Conventions, which follows the Information and Ideas questions, has 11-15 questions of this type appear in the test so about 6-7 per module, or about 26% of all questions.
This is the section where grammar skills will be tested. These grammar skills fall into two distinct categories: “Punctuation and Boundaries” and “Grammar Agreement.” Punctuation questions will test just that, punctuation, with a focus on how to punctuate the boundaries of clauses, phrases, and sentences. Grammar Agreement questions test a broad range of grammar skills, including subject-verb agreement, pronoun-antecedent agreement, and verb conjugation/tense.
Let’s look at an example of a Grammar Agreement question:
For all Standard English Conventions questions, there will be a passage with a blank, and students will have to choose the answer option that makes the sentence grammatically correct.
Often, a good approach to these questions is to look at the answer options and try to determine what makes one option different from the other three. In this case, three of the options, “were,” “are,” and “have been,” constitute plural verbs, that is, verbs that should be used with a plural subject. Only one, “was,” is a singular verb. Even without reading the question we can make an educated guess that “was” will be the correct answer. In this case, we would be correct!
Expression of Ideas
The final section, and the shortest one on the Reading and Writing Test, is Expression of Ideas. Students will see 8-12 of these questions (4-6 per module), meaning they make up only 20% of all questions.
Also like Craft and Structure questions, Expression of Ideas questions are often centered around the process of writing. There are two distinct types of questions that fall in this category: Transition questions and Rhetorical Synthesis questions.
Transition questions are very similar to Words in Context questions, where students will choose the correct word to fill in a blank in a passage. In this question type, however, all the options are transition words. Correctly answering these questions is dependent on identifying the relationship between the sentences in the passage. Is one sentence an example of what was said previously? Does it provide additional information? Does it present a contrasting idea?
Rhetorical Synthesis questions are a more unique type of question that most students have likely never encountered before on any other test (aside from the PSAT!). In this question type, students are given a list of bullet-pointed information about a certain subject, and they are asked to select the answer that best highlights specific information from the list in order to accomplish a certain rhetorical goal.
Let’s look at an example:
Here, the rhetorical goal that the correct answer must match is emphasizing “a similarity between the two sea turtle species.” This means that the student should choose the answer that highlights a fact from the notes that contains a commonality between the turtles (in this case, that they both live in the Atlantic Ocean).
What is a Good Score on the SAT Reading and Writing Test?
Like the old SAT, the Digital SAT scores students on a 1600 scale. Since there are two tests, the Math Test and the Reading and Writing Test, this means that students can score a maximum of 800 point on each of those sections.
What constitutes a good score on the SAT is highly dependent on what colleges a student is interested in applying to. Most schools publicize the average range of scores that accepted students achieved on the SAT, and those score ranges are higher for schools that have more selective admission processes. For example, many Ivy Leagues accept students with scores in the 730-780 range for the Reading and Writing Test, while a large state school, like the University of Texas, accepts students who score in the 690-730 range. It’s important to remember that these are just average ranges, meaning that it is still possible for a student to be accepted at a school even if their scores are below this range. That being said, having scores within or exceeding the range always makes an application stronger!
How to Reach a High SAT English Score
If a student is looking to break into the 600+ range of scores for the Reading and Writing Test, they will have to reach the hard second module. If they receive the easy second module, they will have a difficult time scoring beyond 550. In order to reach the hard second module, students must answer approximately 70% of the questions in the first module correctly. This translates to about 16-17 questions out of 27.
Although the hard module has slightly harder questions, a student will almost certainly see an improvement in score by getting to this module, even if they answer the same number or slightly fewer questions correctly than they would in the easy second module. Although students should remain focused and attentive throughout the entire test, it’s very important that they try their hardest during the first module so that they receive the score boost from reaching the hard second module.
How to Improve Your Score on the SAT Reading and Writing Test
The SAT Reading & Writing is much more approachable today than it was in the past. The paragraph-length passages are quicker to read through, thereby helping students stay focused, and the consistent presentation of question lets testers know exactly what to expect on the exam. As a result, scoring high on SAT Reading and Writing is more competitive.
It’s crucial to perform well on the SAT’s Module 1 to unlock the hard, higher-scoring Module 2, so students taking the SAT should take the time to improve their reading and writing abilities. From reading in your free time to taking practice tests and reviewing your results, there are a number of strategies that can be utilized to improve standardized reading test scores—be sure to give yourself enough time to properly prepare for this exam in order to maximize your SAT studying.
Together with a full ACT prep course and 5-11th grade Math and English classes, Piqisoty offers an entire SAT course to help you ace this test! This full course includes 12 full-length practice tests, 2 PSAT practice tests, 300+ personalized practice Reading and Writing questions, and more. Our specialized test prep software tracks students’ goals, strengths, and weaknesses, emulating the personalized approach of one-on-one tutoring at a fraction of the cost.
