The SAT topic checklist

Tick a level only once that kind of question is solved quickly and correctly under timed conditions, not just eventually, with time to spare. A student who is comfortable at Level 1 and 2 across a domain but stalls at Level 3 has a very different gap from one who is patchy at Level 1, and the two call for different lessons.

The three levels are College Board’s own, taken directly from the official SAT Question Bank: Level 1 covers foundational recall and single-step problems, Level 2 is standard multi-step application, and Level 3 combines several ideas at once, usually under time pressure. Progress is saved in this browser only, so it will not follow you to another device.

The most useful thing a tutor does with a checklist like this is plan it: deciding exactly when each worksheet and practice set gets done, teaching the techniques that add speed on the easier questions, and closing the knowledge gaps that tend to sit inside Level 3.

The usual pattern is for a student to work through Level 1 and Level 2 independently, flagging whatever gives trouble along the way. Those flagged points become the material for the next lesson, aimed at getting the student ready for Level 3, and the Level 3 questions themselves are then worked through in a further lesson.

A lesson typically covers two topics, so bringing every one of the twenty-nine skills up to Level 3 usually runs to somewhere around thirty lessons, an hour each. That figure moves a good deal in practice: it depends on how many areas need real work, and on how high the target score is set. See the level-by-level method this follows →

Domains, skills and difficulty levels are taken from the College Board’s own SAT Suite Assessment Framework and Question Bank, the same source Altair Prep’s topic-by-topic practice library is built from. Nothing here is a substitute for full-length timed mocks, but it is a fast way to see which of the twenty-nine skills need one before test day.