The new SAT test has been redesigned to place less emphasis on vocabulary and memorization of fixed knowledge, and more emphasis on your reading, reasoning, and thinking skills. This means your prep strategy has to shift — you can’t simply memorize long lists of fancy SAT vocabulary words and expect to do well.

On the new test, you won’t see sentence-completion questions. What you will see are “vocabulary in context” questions, which ask you to discern the meaning of words based on their use within a larger passage. The test is designed to assess your reading, thinking, and reasoning skills, not just whether you know a bunch of obscure words. You can expect to see questions based on challenging reading passages, similar to the types of text you’ll encounter in college. The passages will cover a range of subjects: one will be on American or world literature, two will be on history and/or social studies, and two will be on science.

You’ll also see data-analysis questions which assess your ability to interpret graphs and charts. In our increasingly visual, multimedia world, you need to be able to evaluate and apply information that is presented visually.