The Reading part of the SAT has 52 questions. Of those, fully 20 (10 pairs) are what I call double questions. That’s roughly 40% of the available points! So, how the student handles this type of question can have a decisive score impact. What I see, though, is that many students have trouble with double questions. Let’s take a look at a couple of strategies that will almost surely help.

First, what are these double questions, anyway? This is a new question format that first showed up on the March 2016 SAT. The first question in the double resembles many of the “regular,” non-double questions – something like this

6. The passage indicates that the author objects to [something] because

A)  Reason A.

B)  Reason B.

C)  Reason C.

D)  Reason D.

What’s different is that the next question is something like this

7. Which choice provides the best evidence for the answer to the previous question?

A)  Lines 28-31 (“Mary . . . snow”)

B)  Lines 38-40 (“Peter . . . peppers”)

C)  Lines 54-56 (“Along . . . away”)

D)  Lines 61-62 (“Jack . . . clean”)

The first strategy is simply to look ahead. When answering a question, always glance ahead to the next question to see whether it is asking for evidence, like #7, above. If it is, then before even answering the first question, like #6, above, find and mark the four citations. One of these bits of text is guaranteed to be an excellent clue to the answer for the first question. Take advantage! That’s much faster and more accurate than answering the first question “blind.” Without awareness of the citations, the student usually wanders around the passage looking for clues, possibly burning quite a bit of time and possibly never even finding the critical reference.

The second strategy is to remain clear on what evidence is. All too often, students appear to think of evidence just in terms of “is related to.” But we want something much stronger than that. We want to find the citation that proves that the choice we’ve made for the first question is the correct answer to that question. Most students probably have never previously had to think carefully about proving something, so they have to make an adjustment. I tell them to toughen up their thinking – be demanding. Typically, they need some practice – could be working through many examples – to learn to think truly about evidence when dealing with double questions.