If you’re like many students who walk into their first (or second, or third) sitting of the SAT, you’ve probably studied hard and have a stomach full of nerves. To minimize this, I’ve always advocated for not leaving anything to chance, which is why I tell my private students exactly what to study the week of the SAT—and even the morning of the SAT—for a top score!
The reason is simple: if you control as many variables as possible, then you’ll preserve your mental space from doubt when you see a reading passage or math question that seems completely unfamiliar.
So, then, I don’t want any more surprises for you on Test Day…even if they occur after you bubble in your last grid-in answer for Section 4, Calculator Math.
This is why I want to broach one BIG surprise you probably weren’t planning on: the Experimental 5th Section of the SAT.
Wait…WHAT?! What do you MEAN there’s a fifth section to the SAT?!
Before you get all riled up, let me clarify: you, specifically, may or may NOT encounter an experimental 5th section of the SAT. But if you DO, there are some important things to know about it.
The SAT’s 5th Section: What You Need to Know
Not everyone will have a 5th section. For instance, if you’re taking the SAT during a “school day administration”—which typically falls in October, March or April, if your school offers it—you will likely NOT have a 5th section of the test. Why do I say this? Because in the 2021-2022 School Day Coordinator Manual, the possible schedules and scripts do NOT include a 5th section! Also, if you’re someone who gets extended time, you likely will not have a 5th section of the SAT.
The 5th section is 20 minutes long. If you DO get a 5th section of the SAT, you’ll have a 2-minute break after Section 4 (Calculator-permitted Math) before #5 begins. Then the extra section will last another 20 minutes.
The 5th section could be in any subject. I’ve had students who drew a Reading passage, and others who got Writing questions, No-Calculator Math questions, or Calculator-permitted Math questions. You won’t know ahead of time what you’re going to get.
Why is There a 5th Section of the SAT?
The reason there’s a 5th section of the SAT is that the College Board needs to test out possible future test questions on real, high-schooler guinea pigs (like you!) so they can understand those questions’ real-life difficulty. And you WANT them to be able to do this, too, because it helps make your scores more accurate!
You know how SAT and ACT scoring can change dramatically from test to test? For instance, missing 6 math questions might earn a 750 on one SAT’s scoring rubric, but then earn a 700 with a different rubric! That’s a HUGE difference! Though that may seem unfair, there’s a perfectly sound reason: the SAT does something called “equating,” whereby they link a particular score to a particular percentile of aptitude.
Put another way, the College Board is upholding the validity of your SAT scores so that a 1350 on the October test means the same thing to colleges as a 1350 on the May test date. In both cases, a 1350 is the 90th percentile, meaning that you performed better than approximately 90% of students. However, if the test you took is “easy,” that might mean that EVERYONE gets more questions correct, so you’d need to get MORE questions than normal correct to be in the 90th percentile. On a test with harder questions, more students likely miss more questions, so you might get fewer correct but still get your 1350. Make sense?
Is the SAT Graded on a Curve?
But there’s one important catch: being in the 90th percentile doesn’t mean you’re better than 90% of the students who take the SAT the same day as you! In fact, the College Board takes great pains to assure students that they are NOT competing with the other students who take the test next to them! So, NO, the SAT is NOT graded on a curve.
What this means, however, is that the College Board needs a reliable way of seeing how difficult a test question truly IS…before it actually shows up on the SAT! And what is this “reliable way” of determining the difficulty of these test questions? Why, having real test takers try them out ahead of time! (Cue the 5th Section of the SAT!)
Is the SAT’s 5th Section New?
The College Board has always had some way of trying out test questions, even before the current version of the test. In the “SAT I” (as it was called then) that students took from 2005-2015, there was always an “experimental section” hidden in the test: it would be one of the 25-minute sections occurring as section 2 through section 6. You wouldn’t know which one it was, so you had to perform your best on it! Afterwards, you might have scratched your head and thought, “hmmm, it feels like I did more Math sections than usual,” but you wouldn’t know which Math sections counted towards your score and which one didn’t.
The difference with the current Experimental SAT section is that nowadays students ALWAYS know which one it is: it’s the 20-minute, final section, if they GET a 5th section.
Does the SAT’s 5th Section Affect My Score?
Here’s the rub: questions that are experimental do NOT count towards your score. However, the College Board makes it very ambiguous if those questions are ALL in the 5th section…or even ONLY in the 5th section.
To quote the College Board’s website:
“We occasionally pre-test new test items to determine if they should be used on future SAT test forms. Pre-test items can appear in any section and are not included in computing students’ scores. This means that test time is extended by 20 minutes for students taking both the SAT and the SAT with Essay.”
What does this MEAN, exactly? It means that you could theoretically encounter SAT test questions in Sections 1-4 that are “experimental” questions—and that those would NOT count towards your score! But to make sure you end up with the appropriate number of questions to grade (52 Reading questions, 35 Writing questions, 20 No-Calc Math questions, and 38 Calc-permitted Math questions), the test needs to give those missing Qs to you in that 20-minute-long 5th section.
So, in short, NO, “experimental questions” DON’T affect your score…but you don’t necessarily know exactly which questions are experimental!
Should You Try Hard on the SAT’s Experimental 5th Section?
Many students at this point get angry and distill this topic erroneously to mean: “I signed up for 4 sections, and I’m not gonna do anything extra!”…assuming that the 5th Section is truly “extra.”
However, there are TWO important reasons why that thinking might hurt your score:
1) What if you had experimental questions in Sections 1-4? In that case, you truly do need to answer the 5th Section questions to the best of your ability, because there’s a chance some of those questions WILL count towards your score!
2) What if the 5th Section truly DOES consist of only experimental test questions? In that case, do you REALLY want to zone out and bubble in random words onto your bubble sheet? Because then, the College Board might erroneously think that a super EASY question was actually a “hard” question (because so many students blew it off and missed it!)…which means that students who take a later version of the SAT with that question in it might have an unfairly EASY scoring rubric! You don’t want that!
So THAT, my friends, is the long and short of the 5th Section of the SAT: why you have it, why it matters, and most importantly, why you should answer it to the best of your ability!
I know all this information might seem like a lot, so if you need help managing your SAT prep in the most streamlined way possible—to raise your score the most possible points in the least possible time and with the least headache possible—consider working with me.
And if you’re more of a self-study type who doesn’t want to work with a private tutor, I have GREAT news for you: I recently released a whole suite of ebooks and online courses for each section of the SAT and ACT—and you can binge (or merely read/watch) them at your own pace! Get the support you need for a single section of your test…or for all the sections of your test…here.
