Navigating the Hardest Questions on the Digital SAT
- Wallace English
- Mar 23
- 2 min read
Updated: Mar 25
The College Board no longer ranks SAT questions by difficulty, so how did I identify the toughest ones? And what exactly makes certain questions more challenging than others?
While the digital SAT has moved away from traditional "trick questions," many still trip up students because multiple answer choices can seem correct. This often happens when a question targets multiple skills at once—for example, combining punctuation rules with logical flow, or blending grammar knowledge with idiomatic usage. In other cases, the challenge lies in having to zoom in on a specific sentence issue while also considering the broader context across several paragraphs.
These are actual questions pulled directly from the official full-length SAT practice tests. So if you’re the type to remember questions and answers for good, just keep that in mind.
Volunteering, or giving time for a community service for free, is a valuable form of civic engagement because helping in a community is also good for society as a whole. In a survey of youths in the United States, most young people said that they believe volunteering is a way to help people on an individual level. Meanwhile, only 6% of the youths said that they think volunteering is a way to help fix problems in society overall. These replies suggest that ______
Which choice most logically completes the text?
A. many young people think they can volunteer only within their own communities.
B. volunteering may be even more helpful than many young people think it is.
C .volunteering can help society overall more than it can help individual people.
D. many young people may not know how to find ways to volunteer their time.
The Challenge
This question is designed to test your ability to determine the most logical flow of ideas within a paragraph.
What makes it tricky is that two of the options—B and C—initially seem equally reasonable from a logical standpoint.
Explanation
A strong concluding sentence should build on the ideas presented earlier in the paragraph and wrap things up in a way that reinforces the overall message.
In this case, choice B works best because it ties directly into the paragraph’s central point: that many young people may underestimate the true value of volunteering. The data mentioned earlier supports the idea that “volunteering may be even more helpful than many young people think it is,” making B the most logical conclusion.
Choices A, C, and D don’t hold up as well—they make assumptions the paragraph never actually supports. There’s no indication that young people believe volunteering must happen locally (A), that society benefits more than individuals do (C), or that young people are unsure how to get involved (D).
This kind of question pops up frequently in the SAT Reading and Writing section. Often, only one option is truly grounded in the information from the passage, while the others introduce ideas that aren’t backed by the text.
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