Getting ready to take the SAT? You’ll want to include full practice tests as part of your preparation—preferably ones as similar to what you’ll experience on test day as possible. If you’ve been on the hunt for new practice test material, you may have read that Google Gemini and the Princeton Review recently teamed up to launch full-length SAT practice tests. We wanted to see if they lived up to the hype, so our test prep experts took a deep dive into the exams. Here’s what we found.
The testing experience on the AI-generated exams deviated from the real test experience in some important ways. The platform has a very different look and feel from what you’ll see on the official College Board Bluebook app:
Platform tools are missing. These exams do not include the highlighter, answer eliminator, and Desmos calculator provided on the real test.
You can choose to see the correct answer after each response. You can select this option—which is not offered on official College Board practice exams—at the start of a test. On multiple choice questions, the correct answer appears immediately after you click on an option, even if you select the answer accidentally, so you cannot change your answers or go back to correct previous work if you have time left over at the end of the module. Student-produced response questions do include a “check answer” button, however.
Scroll bars are hidden. When you need to scroll down, you may need to click around on the page in order to make the scroll bar appear.
You can choose to see hints if you get stuck. This is another option that you can select at the start of each test, and that is not offered on College Board practice tests. Selecting this option means that you’ll see a small “show hint” prompt below each question.
Answer explanations are not student-friendly. The explanations are not formatted in a way to help you learn the concept, but rather are presented as a bulleted list of steps to solve or answer the questions, similar to reading an answer explanation in a book or PDF. Categorizations of the question types were also often incorrect.
Serious technical glitches can occur. One tester was automatically signed out of Gemini with only two questions remaining on the exam. Upon signing back in, they were prompted to begin an entirely new SAT and could not resume the previous one. According to Gemini, the test modules are session-bound, so once the link expires or the connection resets, the system defaults to a new exam.
We found a few issues that were specific to the Reading & Writing section, and which would seriously impact the student experience.
Question types do not follow the order they do on the SAT. Real SAT Reading & Writing sections include vocabulary-in-context, reading comprehension, grammar, transitions, and rhetorical synthesis questions, in that order. On these exams, however, the questions are not arranged in any particular order, and many testers saw reading comprehension questions at the start of the section.
Some question categories may not appear at all. One tester, for example, did not encounter a single rhetorical synthesis question in an entire module.
Question types do not appear with the same frequency as they do on the SAT. Some testers saw far more vocabulary questions and far fewer grammar questions than usual. Others saw far more reading comprehension questions than usual. Because some question types take longer to complete than others, this can seriously affect timing on the exams.
Tests include grammar concepts that do not appear on the SAT. Testers reported seeing questions about article use and a non-standard grammar question testing transitions with a “none of the above” option—question types you will not see on the SAT.
The exams overly favor literary texts (literary prose, poetry, and plays). These tests featured more than double the number of these texts that appear on the real SAT.
Unfortunately, the Math sections also presented our testers with a number of issues that students are likely to find problematic.
Math sections included concepts that do not appear on the SAT. These included imaginary numbers, the law of cosines, and logarithms.
Some test questions included typos. In some cases, these typos made the questions impossible to solve.
Poor quality writing and unnecessary information made questions needlessly difficult. Imprecise wording made certain questions unsolvable. Other questions included completely irrelevant givens, followed by a straightforward question prompt, which is out of step with the current version of the test. For example, in one case, specific values of natural logarithms were given, even though they were immaterial to solving the question (and the real SAT does not test logarithms anyway).
The order of difficulty does not match the order of difficulty on the SAT. On the real SAT, you'll receive a first Math module with a mix of easy, medium, and difficult questions. If you score well on that first module, you'll receive a harder second module, and if you struggle with the first module, you'll receive an easier second module. Even though our testers answered enough questions correctly to merit a difficult second module, module two was significantly easier than module one.
AI has come a long way in the past few years, and chances are it’ll keep improving. However, are AI-generated practice tests ready to become your go-to for SAT prep? No. The SAT is a high-stakes exam, and you want to go into your test confident that you know the test inside and out and won’t see any surprises on test day. To do that, you’ll want to prep with materials as close to the real thing as possible.
Need help prepping for your next SAT? ArborBridge offers a full line-up of practice SATs that match what you’ll see on test day, and our experts are here to help. Contact us today.
The recommendations above are general suggestions. If you have specific questions, reach out to our experts here. We’re happy to help in any way we can.
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