Thinking of purchasing some official SAT practice tests? Stop right now! We’ve got 8 free tests that you can start off with when planning your SAT prep.
The best part? All of these can either be printed or taken online – let’s get to practicing!
Still thinking about taking a course? We’ve got a list of the best SAT prep courses for this year.
Official SAT Practice Tests
As mentioned, there are 8 free official ACT practice tests that you can either take online with Khan Academy or can download and print. Here are the links to the College Board website where the tests are available for download:
- SAT Official Practice Test 1 Bundle
- SAT Official Practice Test 2 Bundle
- SAT Official Practice Test 3 Bundle
- SAT Official Practice Test 4 Bundle
- SAT Official Practice Test 5 Bundle
- SAT Official Practice Test 6 Bundle
- SAT Official Practice Test 7 Bundle
- SAT Official Practice Test 8 Bundle
For another free SAT practice test you can take online, consider Kaplan’s free SAT practice test. Learn more about their course in our Kaplan SAT prep review.
What You Will Receive With These Official SAT Practice Tests:
- SAT Practice Test Answer Sheet
- SAT Practice Test Answer Explanation
- The Official SAT Practice Test
- The SAT Practice Test Essay
- A Scoring Conversion Guide
Supplement to the Practice Test Materials:
SAT Prep Black Book: The Most Effective SAT Strategies Ever Published
This book made our list of the best SAT prep books and is an amazing resource for those who are seeking helpful answer explanations for the free official SAT practice tests. Although taking the test can be an extremely beneficial experience, not understanding why you answered a question incorrectly will do nothing to improve your score. With this book, written by Mike Barrett, you’ll actually understand the process to solve especially tricky problems as well as gain more confidence in your test-taking ability, as you will learn a process to solve questions utilizing less knowledge and more strategy. This is a great addition to taking the official SAT practice tests, as there are in-depth explanations to 4 practice tests (over 600 questions) and has been proven to raise scores even for those seeking top percentile scores.
SAT Prep Black Book: The Most Effective SAT Strategies Ever Published
A 600-page behemoth, this SAT prep book gets you through all the strategy you'll need to ace the SAT.
Why Do I Need to Take Official SAT Practice Tests?
Taking official SAT practice tests is invaluable to your SAT prep program, as you first learn the feel of the test. You will quickly learn whether you need to improve upon your timing, what sections you struggle on, and what concepts you should focus on and improve upon in your test preparation.
When you take a diagnostic SAT practice test, you are able to gauge how well you are already doing on tested concepts as well as have a rough outline of what areas you need to improve upon. This can be an invaluable insight into what areas you need to spend more time on over the next couple of months. Similarly, taking practice tests throughout your study can help you to improve upon your timing, help to ease your test day anxiety, as well as improve upon answering questions correctly.
Official SAT practice tests differ from other SAT practice tests because they are SAT tests that have been taken in the past. These are the best questions to practice on, as you are working on real questions that are extremely similar to what you will experience on test day. No matter how great of a test prep company or program you are working through, they cannot replicate real official SAT practice questions.
Practicing with questions created by other test prep companies can still be of value when understanding concepts and improving upon skills, but the official SAT practice tests are the closest to the questions you will experience on the test. It is imperative to work on a couple official SAT practice tests before expecting to do well on the SAT.
How Many SAT Practice Tests Do I Need to Take?
How many SAT practice tests you need to take is a personal question that has a lot to do with what your baseline score is and how much more you still need to improve. That said, there are still a few numbers that you can pay attention to when it comes to how many you definitely need to be taking before stepping into an SAT test.
The minimum amount of times you should take simulated SAT practice tests is three
You need to take a simulated diagnostic test to evaluate your baseline score (the score you can reach without studying). The baseline score is determined before you begin an SAT prep program, so as to help you decide what areas you need to focus on.
Halfway through your prep, you should take another simulated, full-length official SAT practice test to track your progress. The last of the minimum 3 official SAT practice tests should be simulated one to two weeks before the SAT to catch any remaining problem areas that can be honed in on for the next several days. Each SAT practice test should be completed using an approved calculator you plan on using on test day to get used to its functions and performance. You can start out with our list of the best SAT calculators.
The recommended amount of times you should take simulated SAT practice tests is five
More practice can only improve your score, as you get used to how the questions are worded, what they are looking for, and how to answer these questions efficiently and effectively. As you are able to access 8 official SAT practice tests online for free, you can use the remaining 3 SAT official practice tests as general practice, broken up into sections, where perhaps you study for 20 to 30 minutes per day, where you complete a section at a time and go through explanations as well as concepts that you missed.
If you do end up running out of official SAT practice tests, there are more free practice tests you can take online, including this SAT practice test by The Princeton Review. Consider taking an SAT prep course – we dive into the best SAT course in our showdown Kaplan vs Princeton Review SAT Course.
As you are preparing for the SAT, be sure that you know what to bring to the SAT so that you have all the tools required to be successful on the SAT.
