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Question Types

Reading & Writing Question Types

College Board Domains and Skills

College Board has their own categorization system for classifying questions on the SAT. Within each section (Reading & Writing, Math) they have 4 "domains" that questions are classified into. Within each of these domains, they then identify several "skills" that questions in that domain might test.

Reading & Writing Domains

Below are the 4 domains used in College Board's Reading & Writing classification system, along with how they define each domain.
  • Craft & Structure
    • Tests your understanding of how and why authors write the way they do
  • Information & Ideas
    • Tests your understanding of what you read
  • Standard English Conventions
    • Tests your ability to edit passages for conventional sentence structure, usage, and punctuation
  • Expression of Ideas
    • Tests your ability to revise passages to meet particular writing goals
When you get your SAT score back, they won't release the problems from the test and show you what you missed, but they will give you a vague breakdown of how you did on each domain (it's rather frustrating, they don't even tell you how many questions you missed per domain, just an approximation like 4 out of 7 bars). Since this is the categorization used by College Board, we will also use it as our starting point. But we will be more concerned with the specific question types, identifying those, and learning the strategies to conquer each one.

Reading & Writing Skills

As mentioned above, within each domain there are several skills identified by College Board. While these skills get us closer to the specific question types, they still sometimes aren't specific enough to cover the different specific types of questions that you'll encounter, so we will identify our own question types to give a more comprehensive idea of what might show up on the SAT.
The skills that fall under each domain are as follows:
  • Craft & Structure
    • Words in context
    • Text structure & purpose
    • Cross-text connections
  • Information & Ideas
    • Central ideas and details
    • Inferences
    • Command of evidence
  • Standard English Conventions
    • Boundaries
    • Form, structure, and sense
  • Expression of Ideas
    • Rhetorical synthesis
    • Transitions

All The Question Types

By layering in some more specific question types within each skill, we can get a more comprehensive idea of what might show up on the SAT. Our question categories will be as follows:
  • Craft & Structure
    • Words in context
      • Fill in the blank
      • Underlined word
    • Text structure & purpose
      • Main purpose
      • Function of underlined portion
      • Overall structure
    • Cross-text connections
  • Information & Ideas
    • Central ideas and details
      • Main idea
      • Details from passage
    • Inference
    • Command of evidence
      • Quantitative command of evidence
      • Illustrate claim
      • Strengthen/undermine claim
  • Standard English Conventions
    • In this case, we'll actually ignore the skills that they list, and replace them with our own general categories below:
      • Punctuation
      • Verb form
      • Misplaced modifiers
      • Pronoun-antecedent agreement
      • Apostrophe usage
      • Questions vs. statements
    • Within some of these categories, there are a variety of rules that may be tested. We'll cover these rules in more detail in the Standard English Conventions section.
    • We'll also present you with a precise process flow that, if followed correctly, will almost always lead you to the correct answer.
  • Expression of Ideas
    • Rhetorical synthesis
      • Or as we call them, "Bullet point questions"
    • Transitions

Navigating Our Reading & Writing Guide

You'll see that we've adopted the College Board's 4 domains, with each listed in our navigation menu. When you click on a domain, you'll be walked through all the question types that fall under that domain.
Next: Words in Context (Fill in the Blank)