SAT

Scholastic Assessment Test popularly known as SAT is a pre requisite to seek your Under graduation Admission in United States of America.

SAT measures critical reading, mathematical reasoning, and writing skills. SAT scores are intended to supplement the secondary school record and help admissions officers put local data-such as course work, grades, and class rank-into national perspective.

College Board, a nonprofit organization conducts the SAT Examinations. All most all the colleges and universities in the United States of America require SAT scores for undergraduate admissions.

SAT consists of three major sections: Critical Reading, Mathematics, and Writing. Each section receives a score on the scale of 200-800. All scores are multiples of 10. Total scores are calculated by adding up scores of the three sections. Each major section is divided into three parts. There are 10 sub-sections, including an additional 25-minute experimental or "equating" section that may be in any of the three major sections. The experimental section is used to normalize questions for future administrations of the SAT and does not count toward the final score. The test contains 3 hours and 45 minutes of actual timed sections,although most administrations, including orientation, distribution of materials, completion of biographical sections, and eleven minutes of timed breaks, run about four and a half hours long. The questions range from easy, medium, and hard depending on the scoring from the experimental sections. Easier questions typically appear closer to the beginning of the section while harder questions are towards the end in certain sections. This is not true for every section but it is the rule of thumb mainly for math and sentence completions and vocabulary.

Critical reading

The Critical Reading section of the SAT is made up of three scored sections, two 25-minute sections and one 20-minute section, with varying types of questions, including sentence completions and questions about short and long reading passages. Critical Reading sections normally begin with 5 to 8 sentence completion questions; the remainders of the questions are focused on the reading passages. Sentence completions generally test the student's vocabulory and understanding of sentence structure and organization by requiring the student to select one or two words that best complete a given sentence. The bulk of the Critical Reading questions is made up of questions regarding reading passages, in which students read short excerpts on social sciences, humanities, physical sciences, or personal narratives and answer questions based on the passage. Certain sections contain passages asking the student to compare two related passages; generally, these consist of shorter reading passages. The number of questions about each passage is proportional to the length of the passage. Unlike in the Mathematics section, where questions go in the order of difficulty, questions in the Critical Reading section go in the order of the difficulty of the passage. Overall, question sets towards the beginning of the section are easier, and Mathematics

The Mathematics section of the SAT is widely known as the Quantitative Section or Calculation Section. The mathematics section consists of three scored sections. There are two 25-minute sections and one 20-minute section, as follows:

• One of the 25-minute sections is entirely multiple choices, with 20 questions.
• The other 25-minute section contains 8 multiple choice questions and 10 grid-in questions. The 10 grid-in questions have no penalty for incorrect answers because the student guessing is limited.
• The 20-minute section is all multiple choices, with 16 questions.

Writing

The writing section of the SAT includes multiple choice questions and a brief essay. The essay sub score contributes about 30% towards the total writing score, with the multiple choice questions contributing 70%.

The multiple choice questions include error identification questions, sentence improvement questions, and paragraph improvement questions. Error identification and sentence improvement questions test the student's knowledge of grammar, presenting an awkward or grammatically incorrect sentence; in the error identification section, the student must locate the word producing the source of the error or indicate that the sentence has no error, while the sentence improvement section requires the student to select an acceptable fix to the awkward sentence. The paragraph improvement questions test the student's understanding of logical organization of ideas, presenting a poorly written student essay and asking a series of questions as to what changes might be made to best improve it.

The essay section, which is always administered as the first section of the test, is 25 minutes long. All essays must be in response to a given prompt. The prompts are broad and often philosophical and are designed to be accessible to students regardless of their educational and social backgrounds.

Candidates wishing to take the test may register online at the College Board's website, by mail, or by telephone, at least three weeks before the test date.

Follow this url to register online

www.collegboard.com

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