With so many resources available, knowing which ones to trust and how to structure a study plan is half the battle.

The current standard is the Digital SAT, administered worldwide in an adaptive format. It covers two main areas: Reading and Writing, and Maths. Each is split into two modules, and the difficulty of the second module shifts based on a student’s performance in the first.

To find out what high-level preparation actually looks like, I sat down with Ahnaf who walked away with a 1580 and Sajia who achieved 1570. Both shared the study habits, resources, and thinking that got them there.

Before the prep began

For Ahnaf, the SAT was almost inevitable. “I became fascinated with studying abroad after finishing my SSC in 2023,” he recalls. “That’s when I started thinking seriously about the SAT.” But the timing of whether to sit before or after HSC was a bit confusing to him.

After speaking with seniors already studying in the United States, everyone gave him the same advice: take the SAT before HSC. Ahnaf committed to that timeline, even as his plate grew heavier. He was serving as General Secretary of DRMC Science Club, running a start-up, managing a passion project, competing in Olympiads, and preparing for the SAT, all simultaneously. “Since ECA is a major factor in college applications, I had to manage it all carefully,” he says.

The exam itself did not go to plan. Ahnaf had registered for a June sitting, carefully calculating the roughly twenty days of time he would have before HSC began on 26 June. Then Eid-ul-Adha fell on 7 June, causing the SAT to be postponed in Bangladesh and some other countries. His rescheduled date became 21 June, just five days before HSC. “This was risky,” he admits. He sat for the exam anyway. He scored 1510 on that first attempt, then improved further in December.

In Sajia’s case, before beginning any preparation, she pulled up the SAT percentile sheet and compared scores systematically. “I found that anything above 1500 is considered a good score,” she says, “so that became my target.” She gave herself five weeks to prepare, which she tried to structure with unusual discipline.

Building the study plan

Both Ahnaf and Sajia began with a blind diagnostic mock test and built the journey forward from there.

Ahnaf took a blind mock in May before doing any structured prep. He scored 1420. “That actually boosted my confidence,” he says. “Most people don’t score that high on a blind attempt.” From that baseline, he dedicated one full month entirely to SAT preparation, with practice slots in the morning, afternoon, and mock tests at night. Before the main test, he started taking full-time mocks at 8:00 AM each morning to simulate real test conditions. In the final stretch, he completed six to seven morning mocks, reviewing his mistakes after each one.

“Focus more on counting mistakes than overall scores,” Ahnaf advises. “Reducing mistakes is how you raise your score. Identify patterns. If you’re weak in inferences or advanced maths, drill fifteen to twenty questions of that type specifically.”

Sajia also took a blind mock test and scored 900. If you think about it, going from 900 to 1570 feels like a dream. In her study plan, Sajia took a different approach to scheduling. She allocated five weeks in total, spending two weeks on Maths and three on English. Every Saturday at 8:00 AM, without exception, she sat a full practice test. Her daily study hours began at four to five hours and had become seven or eight in the final two weeks. However, the day before the exam, she studied nothing at all.

“Consistency was the key,” she mentions.

Mathematics

Both students found Maths more approachable than Reading and Writing, but they didn’t treat it as something less important.

Ahnaf’s approach to Maths was entirely type-based. Using the SAT Suite Question Bank and OnePrep, he went through every maths question at least once, identified all question types, and built a Google Doc cataloguing each subtype with a representative example. “I practised from the lowest-level types upward, not from the top,” he explains. He exported type-wise questions from the SAT Suite as PDFs for focused, category-specific drilling. His SSC and HSC foundation was strong enough that he skipped books like College Panda and Princeton Review for Maths entirely, briefly consulting Khan Academy only for a conceptual refresh.

Sajia’s most impactful Maths strategy was something simpler and more tactical: she learned the built-in graphing calculator, Desmos, inside and out. “Knowing it thoroughly made a big difference,” she says. The Digital SAT’s integrated Desmos tool is genuinely powerful, but most students underuse it, either because they are unaware of its full capabilities or because they do not practise with it during their preparation.

On careless errors, Sajia offers a specific and sobering lesson. “One prominent mistake I made was submitting answers without fully completing a question. I once answered halfway through a maths problem after spotting what looked like a matching answer.” It is, she suggests, the kind of shortcut that can quietly cost points even when the underlying mathematical understanding is sound.

Reading and Writing

Both students invested significantly more effort in the Reading and Writing section, and both developed creative approaches to improving it.

Ahnaf’s most distinctive strategy involved using Gemini as a study partner. He set the AI’s memory to track which question types he struggled with most, then had it find SAT-style passages of those specific types without questions or answer choices attached. He would write a summary of each passage, ask Gemini to rate it out of ten, and work through the explanation of any errors.

For grammar, Ahnaf found the elimination method highly effective and used Erica Meltzer’s grammar book for structured coverage. He also found value in an older Princeton Review, which he felt offered some distinct grammar approaches not found in newer materials. For vocabulary, he combined vocabpractice.com, the OnePrep vocabulary section, and the Word Smart book, reading roughly 200 to 250 words in total. But perhaps his strongest foundation came from years of reading books and research papers from a young age. “This built a strong foundation for SAT-style reading passages,” he says.

Sajia built her English stamina differently. Every night, she spent thirty minutes reading long texts or research papers, not to extract any specific information, but simply to build her tolerance for dense academic writing. She also constructed her own vocabulary list of around 300 words drawn from mock tests and practice questions, avoiding flashcards in favour of encountering words in context and learning their prefixes, suffixes, and root meanings.

For structured Reading and Writing study, she relied on Erica Meltzer and the OnePrep platform, supplemented by several YouTube channels: Penguins Test Prep for English, and Learn SAT Math, SAT Gamify, Tutorlini, James Blue SAT, and Strategic Test Prep for other areas.

Resources and who to trust

But the real question is: which resources should you actually trust? Both Ahnaf and Sajia have clear views on it.

Ahnaf’s trust hierarchy places Bluebook at the top, followed by the SAT Suite Question Bank, then Khan Academy, and finally third-party sources. He is direct about one common pitfall: “Telegram ‘leak’ papers are unreliable. Avoid treating them as official prep material.” He suggested some resources for SAT: Bluebook for mocks, the SAT Suite Question Bank as his primary practice source, OnePrep for free practice and vocabulary, Erica Meltzer for grammar, and the Eclipse Learners practice platform.

Sajia similarly anchored her preparation in official and near-official materials, using OnePrep as her primary platform and keeping a personally curated vocabulary list rather than relying on any single commercial word list. Like Ahnaf, she read extensively, including thriller novels alongside research papers, finding that broad reading built comprehension skills no targeted drill could replicate.

Exam day

Sajia’s exam centre was Mavenwood. She describes the atmosphere as calm and welcoming, the staff as warm, and the environment as comfortable. She did not eat before the exam but brought a chocolate bar in case nerves set in during the test. She had reviewed maths formulae and grammar rules on Thursday evening and rested completely on Friday.

During the break, she stepped away from the test entirely, reminded herself she had completed half of it, and returned focused. At one point in Module 2, she encountered the word “eschew”, a word she had never seen before. She finished the rest of the section, returned to the question, eliminated the choices she could, and chose between the two remaining options on instinct. She was correct.

“Luck does play a role sometimes,” she says.

Ahnaf’s single sharpest piece of practical advice for the final 48 hours is simply this: do not try to cram new material. “The foundation was already built by then. What matters is staying calm and trusting your preparation.”

Ahnaf shared a really interesting story. He had a smooth English Module 1 but struggled in Module 2 with three particularly difficult questions, mostly graph-related or confusing, context-heavy ones, spending only 20 to 30 seconds on each before skipping them and moving on. After finishing the rest of the exam, he returned to those three questions with about four minutes left.

He made a calculated decision to spend three full minutes on one question to answer it with full confidence, leaving only about one minute for the remaining two. He managed to eliminate options and guessed between two choices for one question, then had just 10 seconds to blindly mark the last one.

In the end, one of the guesses was correct and one wasn’t, and he reflects that luck plays a big role in high-pressure exam situations, but so does preparation, since he had mentally rehearsed exactly this kind of time-crunch scenario beforehand.

Looking back

Asked what they would change if they were starting from scratch, both students pointed not to resources or schedules but to mindset.

Sajia would start her vocabulary building earlier and invest even more heavily in daily reading from the very beginning. Ahnaf would advise any student to take the blind mock first, before anything else, so that the entire preparation plan can be calibrated against actual performance rather than assumptions.

If we look for a similar pattern in both their journeys, we come out with this: take a diagnostic test before anything else, build a mistake log and treat it as seriously as any practice set, trust official materials over third-party ones, do not neglect the section that feels easier, and lastly, rest the day before.