The Free SAT Question Bank Beats Most Paid Prep for One Simple Reason: The Questions Are Real

TL;DR: The College Board’s free SAT Question Bank has roughly 3,800 retired, official questions. That’s more practice than many paid courses—and the bigger advantage is that the wording and answer choices match what you’ll see on test day. The tradeoff is a clunky interface and weaker tracking tools, so you may need your own system to stay organized.

Students Keep Buying Big Courses, Then Practice the Wrong Way Anyway

Every fall I see the same pattern: a student shows up with a $400–$700 course login, does a few random problem sets, and then stops as soon as the score “looks fine.” Or they grind 50 questions in one sitting, never review the misses, and tell me, “I’m just trying to get reps in.”

Then I ask a simple question: “Have you used the College Board’s free Question Bank yet?”

Most haven’t. One junior told me, genuinely surprised, “Wait—College Board gives out real questions for free?” She’d already paid for a Kaplan package with a couple thousand simulated questions and assumed that was the gold standard.

The Question Bank (released in 2023) is free—no trial, no credit card—and it’s built from retired SAT items. That matters because third-party companies can imitate the SAT, but they can’t perfectly copy the test’s tone, traps, and answer-choice patterns.

“Now the bottleneck isn’t access to questions—it’s whether students actually use them,” says Marcus Chen, an SAT tutor in Boston with 11 years of experience.

Real SAT Questions Fix the “It Felt Different” Problem

When students practice mostly with third‑party questions, I often hear this after test day: “The real SAT felt different than my prep.”

That’s not just nerves. College Board has consistent habits:

• how it phrases “main purpose” or “best evidence” questions
• how wrong answers are designed to be almost right
• how math questions hide the key step in a small detail (units, constraints, domain)

Here’s a concrete example from Reading/Writing: on “main purpose” questions, official answer choices often include one option that’s too narrow (true for one paragraph) and one that’s too broad (sounds impressive but isn’t supported). Practicing with retired items teaches you to spot those patterns quickly.

I saw this play out with two students last year who started around 1200 on a practice test. One used mostly the official Question Bank; the other used a paid course with mostly simulated questions. Two months later, the first scored 1380 and said the real test felt familiar. The second scored 1310 and said the wording felt different. That’s not scientific proof—but it matches what I’ve seen repeatedly.

You’re Not Going to “Run Out” of Questions (If You Practice Smart)

The Question Bank is big enough that most students won’t finish it—especially if they focus on weak areas instead of doing everything.

A rough breakdown looks like this:

Reading and Writing: ~2,100 questions

• Craft and Structure (vocab in context, purpose, function)
• Information and Ideas (main idea, inference, evidence)
• Standard English Conventions (grammar, punctuation, sentence boundaries)
• Expression of Ideas (transitions, organization, rhetorical synthesis)

Math: ~1,700 questions

• Algebra (linear equations, systems, inequalities)
• Advanced Math (quadratics, functions, exponentials)
• Problem-Solving and Data Analysis (ratios, probability, data interpretation)
• Geometry and Trigonometry

Most paid programs don’t give you more official practice than that. They give you more platform features.

Targeted Sets Beat Random Grinding

The best part of the Question Bank isn’t fancy tech—it’s the ability to filter so you can stop wasting time on what you already know.

You can build sets by:

• Difficulty (easy / medium / hard)
• Skill category (dozens of skills)
• Format (multiple choice vs. student-produced response)
• Domain (Reading/Writing or Math)

This is how you turn practice into score gains: find the specific question type that keeps beating you, then hit it repeatedly until it stops being a problem.