I generally advise starting SAT Reading & Writing preparation four to six months before a student’s first sitting, at minimum. That doesn’t mean there is nothing to do until then. One to two years before that first test, I recommend beginning what I call pre-prep: work that formal preparation depends on but has insufficient time for, along with practice material that is most useful before formal preparation begins.
Three kinds of work belong in the pre-prep window: pre-digital SAT practice, vocabulary building, and grammar study.
The pre-digital SAT still teaches the digital test.
The SAT’s move to a digital format, completed in 2024, changed the test’s format and some of its question types. It did not change the principles behind the correct answers. On Core Reading questions, the correct answer still tells the truth about the passage while the other three violate it, the principle I call the Iron Law. The pre-digital test rewards the same forensic style of reading as the digital SAT, and it penalizes the literary mindset — the habit of reading for what the text leaves room for rather than what it strictly commits to — just as the digital test does.
Many of the trap answers on pre-digital Core Reading questions are the same ones students encounter on the digital test. Even where the question types differ, the skills run parallel: the pre-digital test’s paired passages and the digital test’s Cross-Text Connections questions both require a student to see how one text relates to another. There is also a good deal of overlap on grammar, punctuation, and transitions. The Reading Test and the Writing and Language Test of the pre-digital paper SAT therefore remain sound practice material.
They also offer something the digital test does not. Its Reading Test passages ran 500 to 750 words, against the digital test’s 25 to 150, and a long passage exercises comprehension in ways a short one cannot: following an argument across several paragraphs, and keeping the whole in view while reading any one part of it. Each Reading Test also included a passage from a historical document, giving students larger doses of the older writing they will still meet on the digital SAT.
The timing matters. The closer a student gets to test day, the more important it becomes to practice in the format he will actually be tested in. Earlier, the format matters much less, which makes pre-prep the right time for the pre-digital tests. It’s also the time to leave the official digital practice tests in Bluebook untouched. They are limited in number, and they are best suited to formal preparation, when practicing in the digital format matters most.
The pre-digital tests can still be found online. The most convenient source is the College Board’s Official SAT Study Guide (2020 edition), which contains eight full-length practice tests and is available on Amazon.
Vocabulary sets a ceiling, and it moves slowly.
When a student’s SAT Reading & Writing score plateaus within sight of the target score, parents sometimes assume that she “just needs a little polish”: a few sessions of tips and tricks to close the remaining gap. But polish refines what a student already has. A student who has come that far on a natural feel for the language has often gone as far as that feel can take her; the remaining points require something new, and new abilities take time to build. Sometimes much of what she needs to score higher is a larger vocabulary, and a couple of months before test day, there is little that can be done to supply one.
I’ve written before, in “Why 4.0 Students Struggle with SAT Reading,” that strong vocabulary and reading comprehension are not sufficient for high SAT Reading & Writing scores. They are, however, necessary. Test preparation, properly speaking, is distinct from building that core knowledge and ability. It consists in learning techniques — a method, as I call it — for getting the most points possible out of the knowledge and ability a student already has. But that baseline still sets the ceiling. And while test strategy is relatively elastic, core ability is sticky: it cannot be significantly improved in a short span of time. Given the size of the English language, that is especially true of vocabulary.
Consider the arithmetic. Suppose a student has an hour a day for test preparation, which is more than most students have, and gives fifteen minutes of it, a quarter of her preparation time, to vocabulary study. Over three months, that comes to about twenty-two hours. How many new words will she learn in that time, and how many of those will both appear on her test and make the difference between a right answer and a wrong one? The odds are not high. Meanwhile, those twenty-two hours could have gone to strategic preparation with a much higher expected return.
Spread the same fifteen minutes a day across a year, and it comes to more than ninety hours; across two years, it approaches two hundred. At that scale the odds become far more attractive, and the time no longer competes with test preparation.
I designed the Word List, Walker Prep’s SAT vocabulary tool, specifically for this kind of long-term improvement. Its lexicon targets the kinds of words likely to appear on the SAT; it keeps track of every word a student misses; and it brings each missed word back through spaced repetition, at widening intervals, until she has shown that she knows it. For an excellent free alternative, I recommend Roots2Words, whose offerings include SAT vocabulary resources. Its creator, my colleague Mike Bergin, has decades of experience in SAT preparation.
Grammar asks for a new way of seeing language.
Grammar follows the same pattern. A student who has relied on his intuitive sense of the language can reach the limit of what it will produce on SAT Standard English Conventions questions, and if he knows little formal grammar, the remedy is not quick. There are concepts and rules to learn, but beyond those, he has to learn to look at language in a new way. That is a change in how he sees a sentence, not simply an addition to what he knows.
The SAT does not test grammar concepts directly; no question will ask a student to define a dangling participle. But knowledge of those concepts, and of the punctuation rules, is needed for consistently high scores. Learning that material takes less time than building a vocabulary, but even in a four-to-six-month preparation window, there is typically more of it to master than there is time. Most students now arrive at SAT preparation with little grammar knowledge, and learning the fundamentals beforehand is one of the easiest ways to smooth the path to a higher score.
The Method, Walker Prep’s curriculum in SAT Reading & Writing, includes a full grammar section focused on the specific issues the SAT tests. Alternatively, I recommend Betty Azar’s Understanding and Using English Grammar. I used it extensively as an English teacher and tutor. Azar’s books were originally written with non-native speakers in mind, but I’ve found them to be among the best all-around English grammar resources for native and non-native speakers alike.
Pre-prep leaves test preparation free to do its own work.
The three kinds of pre-prep share a logic. Vocabulary and grammar are slow to build, and the pre-digital tests are most useful before the format of the real test begins to matter. None of them fits well inside four to six months of formal preparation; all of them fit in the year or two before it. A student who comes to formal preparation with a broader vocabulary, a working knowledge of grammar, and experience with similar questions on longer passages has a higher ceiling to work toward, and can invest those months where test preparation is designed to pay off: in getting the most points possible out of the ability that pre-prep helped build.
Learn more about the Method.