I just took the October SAT, and I remember entering decimals like 0.4 as 0.4, not .4. However, I’m starting to worry that this is incorrect. One website said so. But I can’t seem to get a clear answer by doing an online search. Is it okay to put a zero in front of decimal answers even though it’s not required?
It would really suck if they counted this as incorrect. I would also be kind of annoyed, since the SAT directions never says you’re not allowed to write answers this way, it just says that repeated decimals (like .666666) must be written without the leading 0.
It may seem obvious to some students that you can leave off the zero, but in some countries students are taught in school that correct usage requires putting a zero in front of a decimal point. I had students who got a grid-in with three decimal places wrong because they thought it was impossible to fit the number into the four available spaces. They thought you had to write (for example) 0.123. It was not at all obvious to them that it is ok to write .123, so they left the answer blank. Leaving off the zero is not considered acceptable usage everywhere. Students need to know that on the SAT grid-ins, it is not just ok to leave the zero off, but necessary if the answer has three decimal places.
