The Best SAT Prep Materials

Here’s where Kinnu comes in.

Where can I find good SAT practice materials?

The best SAT prep materials are also, luckily, the cheapest. For a complete prep program, you want to combine Bluebook and Kinnu. Start with Bluebook, the very same College Board app you’ll take the real exam in. We recommend making Kinnu your daily driver for retention. While the College Board tools show you what you need to study, Kinnu is what actively drills that underlying knowledge into your memory.

Here’s how the major prep providers compare:

How should I study for the SAT?

The single biggest mistake is treating the SAT like something you can cram for the night before. You can’t. You get better at the SAT through practice, and practice works best when it’s spread out. An hour every couple of days across two or three months will beat a frantic weekend of ten-hour sessions every time, because your brain consolidates skills in the gaps between study, not during one heroic all-nighter.

What are the best prep tips to improve my score?

A handful of concrete tips:

• Never leave a question blank: with no penalty for a wrong answer, a guess is strictly better than nothing on every single question.
• Use the flag-and-return feature to bank the quick points first and loop back to the hard ones, rather than burning five minutes on question three.
• Learn the Desmos calculator until it’s second nature, because a surprising share of Math questions crack open faster when you graph them than when you grind through the algebra by hand.
• Memorize key reference formulas.
• On Reading & Writing, read the actual question before you sink into the passage, and lean hard on the process of elimination; the SAT is multiple choice, so the right answer is always sitting on the screen in front of you.
• Read more books (seriously).
• Finally, the more test day feels like just another practice session, the better you’ll perform when it finally counts, so get those reps in (on Kinnu).