<p>I have a couple questions about the SAT II's.</p>
<p>What format are they?
How long are they?
If I want to go for school for writing, is Literature the only one I should take?
How hard is the SAT II Literature?
How hard is the SAT II US History?</p>
<p>Thanks a lot guys.</p>
<p>Multiple choice. 1/4 off for wrong answers. None for blank.
1 hour each.
Take as many as you want. Most people take 2 or 3 when they sign up.
It’s one of the harder ones apparently.
It’s not that hard actually. Just took it this weekend.</p>
<p>SAT II Lit is one of the most popular tests—about 120,000 students/year take it, v. 150,000 for Math 2 and 123,000 for US History. It’s also the hardest to get a top score on—only about 6% of those who took the test in 2008 scored in the 750-800 range, compared to 23% of those who took Math 2. But if you score very high on SAT CR, you may be able to do very well on Lit as it doesn’t test for substantive knowledge so much as careful reading and interpretation of difficult texts—“CR on steroids,” as someone on CC called it. My D who’s a voracious reader of literature of many different styles from many different time periods and has done a lot of Shakespearean acting and read just about everything Shakespeare ever wrote, scored a 790 with only minimal prep to brush up on a few terms used in literary analysis. Much to her delight, she found the Lit test relatively easy. But some people find it next to impossible.</p>
<p>SAT II US history is relatively easy if you have the time and patience to prep for it. Some people do quite well with minimal prep by taking it at the end of a year-long AP-level US History course, often right after taking the AP test. If you haven’t taken AP history or there’s a time gap between your course/AP test and when you take the SAT II, you’ll definitely want to do a lot of prep to enter the test with a good grasp of various time periods, major political and social movements, major developments in literature and the arts, major economic trends, and the US Presidents and some major legislative, political, and diplomatic developments during their presidencies. That’s a lot to keep straight in your head but if you’re good at memorizing, organizing, and recalling large amounts of information, it can be pretty easy. My D just took it on Saturday. We think she did well. We’ll see.</p>