College Board · the digital SAT
What the test actually is.
Every figure read from College Board carries a dagger. Follow it and you land on the College Board page or specification PDF that says so. Of the 30 statements in the SAT ledger, 23 stand as first written; 6 were corrected before they were published; 1 was corrected in public, and it is still here with the correction shown, because what a study page gets wrong matters more than what it gets right.
Shape and timing
Two sections, four modules.
Each section is two separately timed modules. When time runs out on the first module, the app moves you to the second; inside a module you can move back and forward freely (free within a module†), and there is a 10-minute break† between the sections, outside the testing time.
The adaptive part
Said carefully.
The test is multistage adaptive†. The adaptation happens once per section, not question by question. Module 1 is a broad mix of easy, medium and hard. How you do on it decides which Module 2 you are given.
The common misreading: a hard second module is taken to mean you are “doing well” and an easy one that you have failed. What College Board says is that the second module is targeted to your performance and is, on average, higher or lower in difficulty — it is still a mix. You cannot reliably read your score off how Module 2 felt, and trying to is a good way to lose the module you are sitting.
Two questions in every module are unscored.† They are pretest items being tried out for future tests, they are indistinguishable from the real ones, and they are why 98† questions produce a score built from 90 (25 + 25 + 20 + 20 operational†). There is no way to spot them, so there is no strategy here except the obvious one: answer everything — and College Board’s own advice is that for most students it is better to guess than to leave a question blank, especially after eliminating one or two options (item response theory†).
Scoring
What the number is.
- 400–1600†total, in 10-point steps; each section 200–800
- the two sections added†how the total is made
- item response theory†not a count of right answers: difficulty and the chance of guessing enter it
- a range, not a point†the report shows a band around the score
- 480 and 530†College Board’s readiness benchmarks, Reading and Writing then Math
- at or below†what a percentile counts
- 2–4 weeks†how long scores actually take to arrive
That last line is the one this guide first got wrong: an early draft said scores come back in days. College Board’s score-release page says most weekend scores are released 2–4 weeks after test day†, and the five release dates it has published so far each come thirteen days after the test†: the 22 August sitting on 4 September, 12 September on 25 September, 3 October on 16 October. Plan your applications on the real gap.
What you sit it on
One app, and what is in it.
- Bluebook†College Board’s app; the test runs inside it
- built in, all of Math†a graphing calculator is built in
- nine built-in tools†named on the Bluebook tools page (the count is this page’s, from their list)
- free, official†full-length official practice, at no cost
The single highest-value thing on this page: the official practice tests are free, they run in the same app, and they adapt the same way. Nothing on any prep site — this one included — is worth as much as sitting one of those under a real clock.
Every statement, with its wording and source, is in the SAT ledger — one copy, on the SAT page, rather than a second one here.
Method
Where every figure comes from.
The sources
106 statements about 9 tests, each read off the testing body’s own page or PDF and quoted beside the value: College Board, ACT, Law School Admission Council, ETS, Graduate Management Admission Council and Association of American Medical Colleges — 38 official pages in all. The format statements were read on 8 September 2026 (the SAT’s added ones on 9 and 28 September 2026); the calendars were re-read on 28 September 2026. SAT score ranges for 700 colleges are the U.S. Department of Education’s College Scorecard, public-domain federal data, fetched 8 September 2026: 700 of the 1,037 schools that report an SAT average, complete down to an average of 1,102.
Fetched and computed
Nothing is fetched from a testing body when a page loads: the readings are two files on labs.llc, tests.json and colleges.json. What is computed, on labs.llc, at the moment you load the page: every countdown and registration state (in the body’s own time zone — Eastern, Central for the ACT), the study plan, the finder’s gauges and the arithmetic in the SAT page’s dealt openings.
The limits
These are readings, not a live feed: confirm a deadline on the body’s own site before you rely on it. Calendars end — SAT 5 Jun 2027, ACT 10 Jul 2027 and LSAT 12 Jun 2027 in these files, and the MCAT’s has already run out, which its page says. GMAC’s mba.com and the AAMC’s calendar sit behind browser checks this site will not try to get past; where that cost a reading, the page says so. The Scorecard figures are the latest cohort the Department had published, which trails the current admissions year.
What you type
The test, date, score or state you put into a form here travels only as the address of the next page on labs.llc (?t=, ?d=, ?s=, ?st=). Nothing is stored. The site’s analytics records page views, and that address is part of the view it records. No account, no cookie of this page’s own; the edition switch keeps one word, paper or dark.
The full method · what was here before, what the checking caught, and what this page will never do. Not affiliated with College Board, ACT, LSAC, ETS, GMAC or the AAMC; SAT, PSAT/NMSQT, AP, ACT, LSAT, GRE, TOEFL, GMAT and MCAT are their trademarks.