Introduction

The College Board has administrated the New SAT for the first time in March 2005. For the first time, the New SAT provided an analysis of the college success skills in Critical Reading, Writing and Mathematics. This analysis will give you feedback that will help you better prepare for college by identifying your strengths and weaknesses in these skills.

With a good score in SAT you travel first class. A high composite score and a strong individual score in each section ensure that the best colleges accept you, besides enabling you to compete for scholarships to the extent of full tuition waivers.

New SAT Test Details:

The New SAT has eight types of questions in sections on Critical Reading, Writing and Math.

The Math is basically high school math in Nepal and thus most students here (Nepali students being good at Math) can easily score over 650-800.

The Critical Reading Section formerly called the ‘verbal’ section is a test of ‘critical reading skills’. It consists of addition of paragraph reading and paired-paragraph reading items. This section of the New SAT isn’t all that intimidating after you acquires a decent vocabulary and master the whole bag of tricks that are taught at NIEC.

The Writing Section is a new section consisting of multiple-choice questions and a student-produced essay.

Multiple-choice questions assess understanding of how to use language in a clear, consistent manner and how to improve a piece is writing through revision and editing.

The student-produced essay assesses a student’s ability to develop and express ideas effectively. By including this measure of skill, the New SAT will help colleges make better admission and placement decisions.

The table below gives an overview of each section. The table also shows the types of questions, the total number of questions in each section and the time allocated for each section.

SAT Test Structure:

The SAT also includes a ‘variable section’ in Critical Reading, Writing or Math for which 25 minutes is allocated. The variable section will not count toward your final score. Still because you won’t know which section is the variable one, you need to do your best on the entire test.

New SAT Scoring

In Multiple Choice Questions you receive one raw point for each question answered correctly. For each question that you attempt but answer incorrectly, 1/4 point is subtracted from the total number of raw points. No points are added or subtracted for unanswered questions. If the final score includes a fraction, the score is rounded off to the nearest whole number.

In the Student-produced response question in the Math section, nothing is subtracted for wrong answers.

The essay will receive a score of 2 to 12. However, a blank essay, essays that are not written on topic, or essays deemed illegible after several attempts have been made will receive a score of 0. Then the raw score is tallied against a scaled score table from 200 points to 800 in every section. This is your SAT score