Stephen Minakyan • September 26, 2025
As a parent, you want your child to walk into the Digital SAT feeling confident, prepared, and ready to perform at their best. The new SAT format is shorter, adaptive, and digital-first—meaning that success depends not only on content knowledge but also on strategy, stamina, and familiarity with the testing platform.
Here are 10 strategies that have been proven to help students maximize their scores, along with why professional tutoring support makes such a difference.
1. Manage your time
The Digital SAT is just over two hours long and divided into two sections, each one made up of 2 modules. Reading and Writing modules consist of 27 questions in 32 minutes, whereas Math modules contain 22 questions in 35 minutes. That means you should aim to spend just over one minute per question on English and about 90 seconds per question on math problems to complete every problem in the allotted time. While that seems fine on paper, many students have had the experience of staring at a problem that won’t seem to yield to any of their solution methods, even after spending lots of time on it, so it’s crucial that students know when to move on. Speaking of which…
2. Know when to move on
On the Digital SAT, there’s no penalty for wrong answers. That means never leave a question blank! If the clock is running down, make sure that you have an answer selected for every question. Skipping a question temporarily, however, can be a totally valid strategy on a timed test like the SAT. If a problem is taking you too long, put down an educated guess for an answer and use the Digital SAT’s features to flag a question that you intend to revisit with your time at the end of a section. Of course, some guesses are wiser than others, so next, let’s make sure that our guesses are as smart as possible.
3. Eliminate wrong answers before guessing
Students don’t need to immediately know every right answer to perform well on the SAT, but they need to know how to identify and rule out wrong ones. Eliminating extreme, illogical, or unsupported choices dramatically improves odds, especially when guessing! One helpful guessing tip for grammar and punctuation questions is that those questions often feature multiple equivalent answers; if two answers are the same as one another, they must both be incorrect!
4. Practice in Real Conditions
The College Board’s Bluebook app allows students to take full-length practice tests in the exact digital format they’ll see on test day. Practicing under timed conditions builds both pacing and confidence. In working with a tutor, students should also make sure that they regularly take full practice tests between lessons in order to apply the new strategies and knowledge in a testing environment. Using the Bluebook app will even allow students to familiarize themselves with the platform and its features, like highlighting or the Desmos graphing calculator.
5. Get comfortable with Desmos
Many problems on the SAT are made easier by a calculator, not just for pure number-crunching, but also for graphs. Students are permitted to use their own graphing calculators by hand, but there is also the built in Desmos calculator, which contains some of its own unique features. There are lots of ways that clever math students can use a calculator to their advantage, but first you will need to build familiarity!
6. Build Test-Day Stamina
Even though the Digital SAT is shorter, it’s still demanding. Students should practice sitting for the full test length, focusing without distractions, and using breaks wisely to recharge. Some simple things help, like putting your phone away and silencing it while you take a practice test to avoid hearing notifications. To be at your optimal level of focus on test day, be certain to have something for breakfast on Saturday morning and rest well the night before!
7. Rest up the night before
Before you get in bed early to rest up before the big exam day, you should also get some other items in order. Charge your devices fully for the test, have the Bluebook software downloaded, print your admissions ticket, and have any other items you want to bring all in one place: a calculator, pencils, a mouse, snack, etc. A natural instinct is to try to cram the night before, but students should keep any last-minute studying light. Review vocabulary words, or flip through old notes, but don’t stay up late working on a practice SAT!
8. Start with Grammar!
Start with grammar questions, which appear in the middle of the module! Going out of order in this way gets those simple rules-based problems out of the way early and banks those points, leaving you more time to deal with detailed reading comprehension afterwards.
9. Remember Joe Bloggs!
Since Math problems are ranked by difficulty, the most challenging problems appear at the very end. Often, you will notice a simplistic, seemingly intuitive answer to one of those questions, and many students think, “I must have lucked out! This one is so easy!” A touch of suspicion helps here, as those answers are often incorrect and designed to trap Joe Bloggs, the average unprepared student.
10. Have a helpful tutor
The adaptive nature of the Digital SAT means that strategy is as important as content knowledge.
Tutoring provides:
- Personalized pacing strategies.
- Reinforcement of elimination and guessing techniques.
- Guided practice with the digital tools.
- Accountability and confidence-building.
At TestTakers, students don’t just prepare—they prepare smarter. That’s why TestTakers students consistently score higher: they’re trained to approach the Digital SAT with the strategies, stamina, and confidence that make the difference.
Final Word for Parents
The Digital SAT is new, but the path to success is clear: structured preparation, smart strategy, and expert guidance. With the right support, your child won’t just take the test—they’ll master it.
Contact TestTakers today to learn how we can help your child succeed on the Digital SAT.