In this blog, you will find out:
(1) All the basics and overview of the test,
(2) the specific knowledge and skills that the DSAT test,
(3) how to prepare for the test, and
(4) how to use different tools for faster improvement.
Enjoy!
I. The New DSAT Test Basics (Must-Know)
If you are very new to the Digital SAT aka DSAT, here is all the essential information to learn about the test:
Duration: 2 hours 24 minutes (including a 10-minute break)
Structure: Reading and Writing (two 32-minute modules with 27 questions each) + break + Math (two 35-minute modules with 22 questions each)
Question Format: 4-option multiple choices for Reading and Writing, 75% MC + 25% fill-in-the-blanks for Math
Scoring: 1600 = 800 RW + 800 Math, each score ranging from 200 to 800
"Adaptive" Explained: After you finish the first module, you'll immediatley see an "easy" or a "hard" second module. Once you land on the easy module, your score for the modules will not exceed 600.
Paper-based option: No. But with certain documented disabilities, you can request to take the traditional pencil-and-paper nonadaptive test, which is just one type of accommodations offered (see more about this below).
Content: See a full breakdown of content domains here.
Calculator: A built-in Desmos graphing calculator is available for all parts of Math modules. You can also bring your own calculator as long as it is on the list of accepted calculators.
Scratch Paper: Yes, they will be provided, but you should bring your own pen and pencil for the test day.
At-Home Option: No, you still need to take the test at an official, proctored testing center.
Essay Section: Optional. You can choose to take a 50-minute essay section at the end of the exam. The format is the same as that of the previous paper-and-pencil version SAT, except it is typed rather than handwritten. You can learn more about the essay section here.
College Requirements: As of 2025, a few colleges have reinstated the requirement for SAT scores (see an incomprehensive list here), but for most colleges it is only recommended (useful if you want to stand out but not mandatory). Many students now take it because it is often important in the decision of scholarship recipients.
Dates and Deadlines: For 2025-2026, confirmed test dates are 8/23, 9/13, 10/4, 11/8, 12/6, 3/14, 5/2, and 6/6.
Registration: Click here to register at the College Board site.
Fees: $68, plus $43 if you are testing outside the U.S. Other fees apply according to your needs (find out here).
Accommodations: Students with documented disabilities can request accommodations such as extended time: time and one-half (+50%), double time (+100%), more than double time (>+100%), or extra/extended breaks, as well as assistive technology such as text-to-speech, braille with raised line drawings, contracted, writer/scribe to record responses, braille writer, small-group setting, permission for food/drink/medication, permission to test blood sugar, auditory amplification/FM system, and more. For those testing in school days and not weekends, English learners can request translated test directions, use of bilingual word-to-word dictionaries, one-half (+50%) extended testing time, and more if you meet certain criteria.
Test Interface: The rest tests look exactly like the Bluebook test interface, which looks like this below: with features like a built-in timer, option eliminator, and mark for review for all modules, highlight and notes for the R&W modules, and calculator and references for the Math modules. You can also choose to go to any question through the navigation menu below. You will get a reminder when you have five minutes left for each module.
II. What Does the DSAT Test?
Step 1. Where to Start?
In January 2025, the College Board released a new batch of official full-length DSAT practice exams (SAT Practice 7-10) on Bluebook, the official software for adaptive digital SAT practice exams. In February, they also took down the first batch of the practice tests (SAT Practice 1-3, which you mean find a copy of here), leaving seven official full-length adaptive practice exams available for students looking to test the computerized test (download the official Bluebook app).
Look no further: these are the very foundation of the best resources you can find to master the test. Anyone prepping for the test should start here: take an official SAT practice and see what your scores look like without studying for it. Not just to see the scores, but the Knowledge and Skills report (which looks like this) within Your Score Details report to see your performance across the 8 content domains tested by the DSAT for free.
Step 2. How to Use the Score Details Report?
As the report shows, there are 4 content domains in the Reading and Writing modules, with "Information and Ideas" and "Craft and Structure" for the Reading component and "Expression of Ideas" and "Standard English Conventions" for the Writing component. For the 4 content domains in Math, "Algebra" and "Advanced Math" are clearly more heavily featured in the test, with twice as many questions that will appear in the modules than "Problem-Solving and Data Analysis" and "Geometry and Trigonometry".
The report is especially important if there are gaps in your knowledge and skills tested by the DSAT. However, these descriptions are too broad to be helpful. The College Board has provided more specific sample questions associated with the content domains in its official Skill Insights Tool (here). Each content domain is broken down into 7 score bands (from 360 and lower to 680 and higher), which corresponds to the 7-level bar graphs seen on your score report. You can see up to two sample questions associated with each score band in the Skills Insight Tool. Of course, this is still far from a comprensive representation of what the DSAT test includes.
Step 3. What does the DSAT cover, specifically?
The College Board has released more specific knowledge/skill testing points, which can be found here, or see below for a comprehensive breakdown of official practice questions associated with each testing points. In all, there are 18 (or 19, officially) knowledge/skills for the 4 domains in Math and 10 knowledge/skills for the 4 domains in Reading and Writing.
This is better than just knowing the content domains. However, as much as the above information is helpful, it doesn't help you learn the knowledge and skills required to improve your scores. Many students see very little improvement between their tests. This is partly because knowing you have gaps in "Circles", for instance, doesn't help you know what you need to study in order to improve, as there isn't a clearly outlined range of specific question types and knowledge range tested.
How do we know the full scope of the content tested? Unfortunately this can only be learned by doing all the questions provided by the College Board. There are 4 sources for these questions: 7 Bluebook SAT Practice tests and their 7 nonadaptive paper-based counterparts (which have about 25% distinct questions from its digital counterparts, and can be downloaded here), the official Question Bank that includes 2,177 official practice questions (access here), the Official Digital SAT Study Guide (link here) which unfortunately contains 4 practice tests that overlap completely with the ones in the Bluebook app but also 191 uinque sample questions (so use caution when deciding whether it's worth buying), and the real DSAT tests, which can be taken 8 times a year (see DSAT test dates for 2025-2026 here).
Among these sources, only the real DSAT tests authentically represent the test content for two reasons: (1) there are many Khan Academy practice questions in the released practice tests and the Question Bank, which are definitively not quite like the real test questions (in ways that Kaplan's and Princeton Review's practice tests are not quite like the real ones - different groups of test makers tend to make questions from different angles), and (2) the real tests will gradually increase in difficulty to maintain a certain correspondence between the test scores and the percentiles (e.g. the College Board has to make sure less than 1% students get 800, otherwise there wouldn't be enough difference to tell between the 98% and 99% percentile) as students keep getting better at the test with more helpful information released about the test.
III. How Should I Prepare to Get High Scores?
Step 1. Overcoming Test Trauma
How do we know what the real tests are like if the practice tests are not fully representative of it? First of all, there are already a lot of leaked real tests, despite how the College Board claimed the test has gotten more secure (which I believe to be true - 100% security is almost impossible to achieve, but since a lot of the paper-based tests were leaked by local test administrators, the digital version will no doubt make it significantly harder to leak, thereby at least reducing the scope of the leak). Search for them hard enough and you'll find them. And the good news is, we can be sure that, no matter how fast the test gets harder, and no matter how real questions differ from the Khan Academy ones, the test will never exceed the scope of the test content or format. It will always test the same things, only the proportion of harder questions may increase. Once you grasp how to do a certain type of question, you will always be able to find the correct answer.
So, however intimidated or traumatized you are by the test, the way you study for it doesn't change: just break down all the (many, but still limited) question types and traps they will throw at you, and you will always get a high score.
The graph below shows knowledge and skills broken down into finer, specific details and question types that correspond to official Math questions, which tells you the real content and scope of the test.
Yes, it seems like a lot, but when you break the content down to this level of detail, you only have to practice a few questions to get the knack of each type of testing point or trick question format. Conversely, those who don't spend their time zooming in on specific types of questions that challenge them often don't see a lot of improvement, even if they feel like they have practiced a lot.
So the question is, is there a faster way to zoom in on questions that decide whether you can improve a lot or not?
Step 2. Zooming in on Questions that Matter
There are two major ways to find your weak areas for accurate improvement.
First, the official Question Bank. If you (1) have a lot of time to prepare in advance, or (2) need to improve on many areas across the board, (3) can easily locate one or more specific areas you're particularly aching on, "Circles", or "Nonlinear Functions", for instance, then the official Question Bank can be just the right tool for you.
After you sign in to "My Practice" site by the College Board, which is where the Bluebook app takes you to for your SAT Practice test score report, you can go to the Question Bank and choose the test, the module, and the content domains you'd like to see all their practice questions for. The College Board also does you a service by showing you all your previous practice test performance on the right, so you can easily see the domains you need to practice for.
Once you're on the question list page, you can further narrow down your choice through the filter function, which allows you to choose the level of difficulty and the specific knowledge and skills that these questions test. The only problem is that they don't tell you which specific knowledge or skill are your weak areas, so the only thing you can do is either by guessing from the test questions you got wrong (which you can see from your Score Details report) or clicking into the questions one by one and see which ones you may find more challenging and need to zoom in on.
This will prove to be incredibly annoying and time-consuming. Once you try out the My Practice site, you'll know exactly what I mean. On top of that, within each specific skill, there are 40 - 100+ questions. You'll also pretty confused about whether you should skip practicing Medium questions even if you know you are probably suffering on the Hard ones, because you can still make mistakes over Medium questions if you don't feel confident about your grasp of an area.
Not to mention the fact that a large portion of the official Explanations for the practice questions are not very helpful. If you stick to using their method in the actual test, there is simply no way in the world you'll finish all questions by the end of the Math module.
This is why there is a second, more efficient way for improvement.
And the second way is using online test prep tools designed to find your more specific weak areas. These tools usually lead to faster improvement because they break down the knowledge content domains into even more specific knowledge and skills tested (referred to as "test points" below for convenience). For instance, in the Skill called "Circles", which only contains as few as 23 practice questions, you need to master 13 unique test points including "Arc", "Radian", "Circular Functions", "Isoceles", "Tangent Line", "Pythagorena Theorem" and more in order to answer all related practice questions correctly. How likely are you to encounter all these points in just one practice test? Impossible. That is why if you just guess the scope of the test from the limited number of practice tests you have done, you'll likely leave test points uncovered and be surprised to find questions that look unfamiliar to you on the test day.
Such unique test points (see the graph from "Step 1" for all math test points), combined with the ways questions are constructed to test these points, tell you the real scope of the test.
Another thing that online prep tools are helpful (just as professional tutors are, just not as personalized and tend to require more efforts on students' end) is they tend to provide better explanations that can help you understand where you got wrong and, more importantly, allow you too finish simialr questions faster during the test. For instance, for questions that you need to use Desmos to solve, the official Explanations will only tell you how to solve them manually. If you use such methods, you'll never be able to finish the test in time. Yet most of these online platforms do a better job of tell you how to solve them with Desmos as they should be.
To wrap, if you'd like to get high scores for the DSAT test without help, it's advised that you start your test prep two or three months in advance. Below is a schedule I've made for test takers who'd like to make the most out of the College Board resources, which is in fact enough if you really put the work in.
Very best luck to your DSAT test prep and hope you do your best on your test day!