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The SAT Writing Section (Essay): Here’s What You Need to Know

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The SAT recently revamped itself to more accurately test what students learn in school. The new version is less deliberately tricky and confusing, but it’s still a challenging, exhausting test. Let’s say you’ve taken both the ACT and the SAT and you perform better on the SAT. Now that you’ve chosen it as your go-to test, how do you get through the essay portion, especially if you hate writing?

Fun fact: the SAT has plenty of new practice tests , which include essays. For the purposes of this post, I’ll be working from this practice essay , so it might be useful to have it open as you read. We’ll go through what’s expected, what scoring looks like, and how to go about writing the best essay you can.

Understand What You’re Being Asked to Do

The new SAT no longer asks you to make up ideas and references from scratch (which, honestly, is probably for the best). Instead, it provides you with an essay and asks you to analyze it, much in the same vein as an in-class analytical or an AP English Language essay.

The Assignment

The assignment reads as follows. At the top you’ll see a generic introduction for what to look for as you read:

As you read the passage below, consider how (the author of the passage) uses:

• evidence, such as facts or examples, to support claims.
• reasoning to develop ideas and to connect claims and evidence.
• stylistic or persuasive elements, such as word choice or appeals to emotion, to add power to the ideas expressed.

Then, at the bottom, the instructions get specific. For this essay, they read like this:

Write an essay in which you explain how Bobby Braun builds an argument to persuade his audience that the US government must continue to invest in NASA. In your essay, analyze how Braun uses one or more of the features listed in the box above (or features of your own choice) to strengthen the logic and persuasiveness of his argument. Be sure that your analysis focuses on the most relevant features of the passage. Your essay should not explain whether you agree with Braun’s claims, but rather explain how Braun builds an argument to persuade his audience.

What does this mean? Essentially, as you read, pick out the techniques the author uses to make his or her point, then write a detailed essay that covers a couple of the main ones. Brush up on your knowledge of literary terms and devices well in advance of writing the SAT essay. You don’t have to know them all, but know the most commonly used ones really well (tone, diction, imagery, simile/metaphor, allusion, rhetorical question, anecdote, and symbolism, to name a few) so you can rely on those. In an argumentative essay, like this one, an author will always use tone, diction (choice of words), and some kind of persuasion technique (Logos? Pathos? Ethos? Anecdote? etc.).

How is the essay scored? Two testers will read your essay and will provide a score of 1-4 on three different benchmarks: reading, analysis, and writing.

Did the writer understand the content? Did they quickly summarize the argument/point and then move quickly into their interpretation of it? Did they paraphrase and directly quote?

Did the writer not only identify the right literary terms/devices but assess their uses effectively? In other words, did the writer understand why the author used those devices and say so? Did the analysis integrate into the rest of the essay?

Is there a strong thesis, body paragraphs for each device, and a quick conclusion? (More on organization below.) Is the writing “strong,” i.e., sentence variety, no unnecessary words or repetition, strong words, and sophisticated reasoning?

The testers’ scores are then added together for an aggregate final score. So, a top score would be 8/8/8.

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Final Thoughts

Unless you’re being given extra time, you have exactly 50 minutes to complete the essay. This sounds like a lot (and it’s more than it used to be), but don’t be fooled. You’ll use the time.

Students with special accommodations might be able to take the test on a computer, but otherwise it’s a written test. Your test booklet will be scanned into a computer. If you make a mistake, don’t erase your work, because it causes smudges and can make it hard for the tester to read. Simply cross out and rewrite. The testers are trained not to read crossed-out material. If you’ve been told your handwriting is impossible to read, write a little more slowly than you might otherwise. Choose the style that’s more legible for you: print or cursive. When you write practice tests, give it to someone and ask if they can read it.

You’ll take the SAT essay last, after every other section has been completed. So you’ll be exhausted. There’s no way around that, unfortunately, beyond bringing snacks and water on test day and walking around during breaks to take the focus off your brain for a couple minutes. Practice is key; you’ll want to be able to read an essay quickly, pull out devices, and write a straightforward essay with a minimum of confusion and anxiety. Only practice and memorization of the right information will get you there.

As you prepare to take the SAT, take a look at some example essays that scored highly. It won’t be the same subject matter, but the structure and language will be aspects you can emulate.

Read with the Assignment in Mind

Imagine that your proctor has told you to turn to the essay section. You already know the basic assignment, so you can actually skip the top introduction and dive right in to the essay. Don’t get bogged down with unfamiliar words or the most complex sentences. You don’t need to absorb every single word of the essay. Read to find devices you can use. Circle them and ID them as you go. Don’t be picky right away—just observe and note what you see.

Go ahead and skim the bottom instructions, but even then the first sentence is the only really important one. In this case, the gist is: how does Braun persuade his audience to invest in NASA? Then, go back to the devices you found, and pick out the three strongest and/or most used devices to structure your essay. Can’t find three? Remember, an author always uses tone (point of view) and diction (word choice) so those are two easy ones if you’re stuck.

The process of reading and pulling out devices should take no more than eight minutes.

Make a Quick Outline

I know this one sound counterintuitive, given what I said about time limits, but bear with me. Just starting to write without a clear path is hugely problematic for timed essays. Even the best writers make a mental note of their general direction. Without planning, you might change directions mid-essay, forget your thesis and end up arguing something else, or wander off completely without realizing it.

The outline can be short and sweet. For example, with this practice essay, it could look like this:

Intro: Braun argues that continuing to invest in space tech and research keeps us competitive in the world economy. Devices: logos, imagery, allusion

Body 1: Logos (logic): paragraph 3, 5, 7

Body 2: Imagery: paragraph 4, 6

Body 3: Allusion: paragraph 8

Don’t even bother to include your conclusion in your outline. It’s pretty much the same content as your intro. Also, remember that you don’t need to tackle every aspect or device in the essay. Highlight where your devices are, then focus your analysis to those sections. In the outline above, I’ve structured the devices so that you’re going through the essay in almost chronological fashion. You don’t have to do this, but it makes the essay-writing a bit easier.

The process of outlining should take no more than two minutes.

Write Quickly but Methodically

Don’t waste a lot of breath with a big, drawn out introduction. State the argument of the author in one sentence, then your thesis, which should be a list of the three devices you plan to use. Keep it simple and easy, then move on.

For each body paragraph, make a quick topic sentence explaining which device you’re analyzing. Spend one sentence (ONLY one) summarizing how the author is using the device. Begin to use quotes or paraphrase; after each example, analyze why the author uses the device and the effect it has. About three quotes or examples are usually standard. Then, at the end of the paragraph, use one sentence to sum up the effect the device has on the whole essay. Use sample essays for examples of this structure.

See the numbers at the side of each paragraph? When you quote directly or summarize directly, put the number of the paragraph in parenthesis afterwards to cite where you’re getting the information from.

For your conclusion, simply restate what you’ve said before. If you’re feeling extra-confident, feel free to add a key takeaway from the analysis, but it’s not necessary. So, your conclusion can be two sentences just like your intro.

What if your writing style isn’t advanced or similar to the example essays? Work with a teacher or tutor who can help you develop your skills if you have the time. If not, just write simply and clearly. Don’t use overly technical words. Don’t make really long sentences just for the sake of doing so. Even simple, forceful language can be effective so long as your argument is good. So focus your attention on ensuring that you know what good analysis is and how to replicate it.

You’ll have 35 minutes to write. Keep an eye on the clock, but mostly just focus on writing quickly and clearly.

Leave a Few Minutes for Proofreading

Again, I know you’ll be flying through this essay at lightning speed to get everything done effectively. But this one’s important too. When you write quickly, grammar and spelling can fall by the wayside. That’s totally normal, so don’t freak out. But you will be graded on such aspects in your final score, so leave 5 minutes max at the end to skim through your essay, pinpoint where you made mistakes, cross out the word or phrase, and write the correct word or phrase above it. Try to make corrections clearly so that the tester knows which version to read.

And that’s it! Easy, right? (Totally kidding.) As with everything else, practice will help. If you’re not already doing this kind of essay in class, do a few practice essays at home. Make sure you do the EXACT process start to finish: time yourself, write an outline, and so on. Part of success is building the muscle memory to go into the essay with a solid base of experience and confidence that you’ll succeed.

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How Long is the SAT? Your Top Timing Strategies

Featured Expert: Alexia Olguin, University of Pennsylvania

How long is the SAT? Understanding the test's structure and duration is vital to getting a good SAT score . We provide a comprehensive guide on how long the SAT is, how its time is distributed across sections, and strategies for optimizing your speed and performance. Remember, achieving a top SAT score isn't just about studying hard; it's also about understanding the test's structure and planning your approach accordingly. And if you’re still wondering whether you should write the SAT or ACT , this article will help you make this decision.

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Article Contents 11 min read

How long is the sat what content is covered.

While the SAT is slowly releasing its hold on post-secondary institutions (even the easiest Ivy League schools to get into made their admissions test-optional), it is still quite widely used in college admissions in the US. This standardized test claims to measure your literacy, numeracy, and writing skills — all of which are deemed essential for academic success in college.

The total duration of the SAT is 3 hours (180 minutes) for the main sections. However, if you choose to take the optional Essay section, the test lasts 3 hours and 50 minutes.

The main sections of the SAT are Evidence-Based SAT Reading , Writing and Language , and SAT Math , which is further split into sections with and without a calculator. The Essay section, if taken, is the last part of the test.

Want to know how to make your college essay stand out and what do you need to avoid? Watch this video:

SAT Sections

The SAT is composed of various sections, each with its unique set of guidelines, types of questions, and allotted time. Understanding these components is vital as it helps you devise a plan for each section and manage your time effectively during the test. Here, we will explore each section in detail, discussing the number of questions, the academic disciplines each covers, and what each section aims to assess.

Reading Section

The Reading Section of the SAT consists of 52 questions to be answered in 65 minutes. This section aims to test your reading comprehension skills. The questions are based on five passages, which include one literature passage, two science passages, one historical document, and two social science passages. Here's a closer look at what the Reading section comprises:

Academic Disciplines:

• Social sciences (such as economics, psychology, and sociology)
• Natural sciences (such as biology, chemistry, and physics)
• U.S. and World Literature
• U.S. Founding Documents or a text in the Great Global Conversation

The Reading section is claimed to test your ability to:

• Understand words and phrases in context
• Understand the purpose and main idea of a passage
• Understand relationships between parts of a text
• Identify the author's argument or claim
• Interpret data and information presented in different formats, such as tables or graphs

The Writing and Language Section consists of 44 questions, which need to be completed in 35 minutes. All questions in this section are multiple-choice and are based on passages.

• Social studies

The Writing and Language section is claimed to test your ability to:

• Understand grammar rules and conventions in English
• Understand words in context
• Analyze and edit passages at the sentence and paragraph level
• Understand the development, organization, and effective language use in written English

Math Section

The Math Section is divided into two components: one that allows calculator use (38 questions, 55 minutes) and one that doesn’t (20 questions, 25 minutes). The questions in this section are both multiple-choice and grid-in types.

• Problem-solving and Data Analysis
• Advanced Math
• Additional Topics (geometry, trigonometry, and complex numbers)

The Math section is claimed to test your ability to:

• Understand mathematical concepts and apply mathematical principles to solve problems
• Interpret and analyze data to solve problems
• Understanding the structure of expressions and being able to analyze, manipulate, and rewrite these expressions

Essay (Optional)

The Essay section, though optional, is recommended for students applying to colleges that require an SAT essay score. You have 50 minutes to read a passage and analyze how the author built an argument in the provided text.

This section is claimed to test your ability to:

• Comprehend a source text
• Analyze how the author builds a persuasive argument
• Write a clear and coherent essay that deconstructs an argument

Time management plays a crucial role in achieving a high score on the SAT. With a limited timeframe to answer a vast array of questions, strategic planning is key. Here are some tips to help you make the most of your time during the test:

1. Practice in a Timed Environment

Familiarizing yourself with the SAT's timing structure can significantly reduce stress on the actual test day. Take several practice tests under the same time constraints you'll face during the SAT, in the same kind of environment. This will help you understand the pacing of the test and gauge how long you can spend on each question. By doing this regularly, you'll gradually increase your speed and efficiency.

2. Strategic Ordering

There's no rule stating you must answer the questions in the order they're presented. A strategic approach would be to first tackle the questions you find easy or are confident about, then move on to the more difficult ones. This method ensures you garner as many points as possible within a short time and prevents you from getting stuck on a challenging question early on.

3. Figure Out Your Answer Before Looking at the Multiple-Choice Options

For multiple-choice questions, try to come up with your answer before looking at the provided options. This strategy can prevent you from being swayed by incorrect answers that may appear plausible at first glance. Once you have your answer, you can look at the options and select the one that best matches. This way, you're relying on your knowledge rather than guesswork.

Strategies for Improving Passage Analysis in SAT Reading Section

Mastering the art of passage analysis is essential for performing well in the SAT Reading section. It involves understanding the main points, identifying significant details, interpreting the author's purpose, and making logical inferences. Below are three strategies that could enhance your passage analysis skills:

1. Highlighting

While going through a passage, it is beneficial to highlight or underline key phrases, arguments, or points of view. This strategy helps keep track of the central theme, main characters, or any shifts in tone or perspective throughout the passage. However, avoid over-highlighting. Try to mark only critical details that contribute directly to the main point or theme of the passage. This way, when you need to refer back to the passage for a question, you can quickly identify the relevant information.

2. Contextualizing the Information

When you read a passage, try to understand it within its broader context. This means considering who the author is, the potential audience, the historical or social setting, and the overall purpose of the text. Pay attention to any given information about the source of the passage. All these factors can influence the message, tone, and language of the passage. Moreover, understanding the context can also help you infer the meanings of unfamiliar words or phrases.

3. What Should I Do If I Don’t Understand the Passage?

It's possible that you'll encounter complex or challenging passages on the SAT. When this happens, don't panic or waste too much time trying to understand every detail. Start by identifying the main idea of the passage. If necessary, reread the first and last sentences of each paragraph, as these often contain the core arguments. Break down complex sentences into smaller parts, and try to understand each part. Then, move on to the questions. Many times, the questions will guide you back to the specific details or parts of the passage that are crucial for answering them. Lastly, practice reading a variety of texts, including historical documents, scientific reports, and literary pieces, to familiarize yourself with different writing styles and structures.

Strategies for Improving Your Speed in SAT Writing and Language Section

The SAT Writing and Language section demands a balance between speed and accuracy. It consists of 44 questions that must be answered within 35 minutes, which equates to less than a minute per question. Hence, improving your speed without sacrificing precision is crucial. Below are some strategies to help you boost your pace:

1. Familiarize Yourself with the Question Types

The SAT Writing and Language section primarily tests your understanding of grammar, punctuation, sentence structure, and argument development. By understanding the types of questions you'll face, you can quickly identify what each question is asking and avoid wasting time trying to figure it out. Practice frequently with sample questions to get the hang of each type.

2. Read Actively and Purposefully

Instead of reading the entire passage first, read the relevant sentence or surrounding sentences for each question. Look for grammatical errors, awkward phrasing, or inconsistencies in the information provided. Reading actively allows you to stay focused and pick up the needed information quickly.

3. Answer Questions in Order

The questions in the SAT Writing and Language section are generally in the order of the passage. Answering questions sequentially can save time since it enables a smooth, logical flow of reading without needing to jump back and forth in the passage.

4. Use the Process of Elimination

Often, it's easier to identify the wrong answers than the correct one. Eliminate options that are clearly incorrect due to grammatical errors, redundancy, inconsistency with the passage, or other discernible reasons. This narrows down your choices and speeds up the decision-making process.

5. Trust Your Initial Judgment

Your first instinct is often correct, especially if you've prepared well. If an answer choice seems right immediately, it probably is. Don't waste time second-guessing yourself unless you have a good reason to do so.

6. Practice under Timed Conditions

Regular practice under timed conditions can significantly improve your speed. It can help you get used to the pace of the test, understand how much time you can afford for each question, and learn to make quicker decisions.

Strategies for Improving Your Speed in the SAT Math Section

The SAT Math section demands precision and speed. You need to answer 58 questions in 80 minutes, which equates to about 1.5 minutes per question. Here are some tips that can help you increase your pace without compromising accuracy:

1. Master Key Math Concepts

The SAT Math section tests specific math concepts, such as algebra, problem-solving and data analysis, geometry, and some trigonometry. Familiarize yourself with these topics. The better your understanding, the faster you will be able to identify and use the correct strategies to solve problems.

2. Know Your Formulas

While the SAT provides some formulas at the start of the Math section, it doesn't include all the formulas you might need. Memorize commonly used formulas that aren't provided so you won't waste time trying to recall them during the test.

3. Understand the Question

SAT Math questions often contain extra information or are worded in ways that make them seem more complex than they are. Take the time to understand what is being asked before jumping into calculations. This can save you from time-consuming mistakes.

4. Develop Mental Math Skills

Practice doing simple calculations in your head to save time. The less you rely on a calculator for basic operations, the faster you can solve problems.

5. Use Your Calculator Wisely

While a calculator is a useful tool, it can also be a time sink if not used strategically. Use your calculator for complex calculations but rely on your mental math skills for simpler ones.

6. Practice Grid-In Questions

The SAT includes "grid-in" questions where you calculate the answer and fill it in on a grid. These questions can be time-consuming because they require manual entry of answers. Practice these types of questions so you can do them more quickly on test day.

7. Skip Difficult Questions

Don't spend too much time on a single difficult question. Instead, skip it and move on to the next question. You can return to it later if you have time.

8. Regular Timed Practice

The more you practice under timed conditions, the better you'll get at managing your time. Use practice tests to gauge your speed and figure out where you need to improve.

Writing the optional essay on the SAT can be a daunting task, especially with the time constraint. You have 50 minutes to read a 650-750 word passage, analyze the author's argument, and write an essay. Here are some strategies to help you improve your speed:

1. Understand the Task

You're not being asked to agree or disagree with the author's argument, but to analyze how they build their argument. Understanding this can save you time as you won't spend time crafting your own argument.

2. Read Actively

As you read the passage, underline or mentally note persuasive elements such as evidence, reasoning, and stylistic or persuasive devices used by the author. This will save you time when you start writing your analysis.

3. Plan Your Essay

Spend some time planning your essay before you start writing. Identify your thesis statement and the examples you'll use to support it. A clear plan will make your writing more efficient.

4. Practice Writing by Hand

If you're not used to writing by hand, it can slow you down on test day. Practice writing essays by hand to improve your speed and ensure your hand doesn't get too tired during the actual test.

5. Be Concise

Avoid unnecessary verbosity. Being concise in your writing will help you cover more points in less time.

6. Practice Under Timed Conditions

Like with every other section of the SAT, practice makes perfect. Regularly practice writing SAT-style essays under timed conditions. Over time, this will help you get a sense of how much you can write within the allocated time and improve your writing speed.

7. Proofread, if Time Allows

If you have time, quickly read through your essay to correct any obvious mistakes. But don't spend too much time on this. It's better to have a fully developed, slightly flawed essay than an incomplete but flawless one.

How to Prepare for the Test Day?

Preparing for the SAT involves more than just studying the content; it also requires logistical and mental preparation. Here are some key tips:

• Plan Your Test Day: Know the location of your test center, its distance from your home, and the time it takes to reach there. This planning can help prevent last-minute stress.
• Get a Good Night's Sleep: It's essential to be well-rested for the test. A good night's sleep can significantly enhance your performance.
• Pack Essential Items: Pack all necessary items, such as your admission ticket, photo ID, pencils, erasers, calculator, snacks, and a watch (without an audible alarm), the night before the test to avoid rushing on the morning of the test.
• Stay Calm and Confident: Maintaining a positive mindset is critical. Even if you encounter challenging questions, stay calm, use your strategies, and do your best.

Knowing what to expect on the day of your SAT test can significantly reduce stress and enable you to perform at your best. In addition to the academic preparations, familiarize yourself with the procedures and regulations that will be enforced on test day.

Test Center Closings

Stay updated on any test center closings leading up to your test day. Check the center's website on the morning of your test to ensure it hasn't closed or relocated.

Arrival and Entry

Test centers open their doors at 7:45 a.m. Arrival after 8 a.m. will result in denial of entry. If you're late or absent, consider rescheduling instead of re-registering as it is often cheaper. Ensure you arrive prepared with all necessary items.

Testing Process

Testing begins between 8:30 and 9 a.m. The proctor will assign seats and read instructions from a manual. They can only answer procedural questions, not those about test content. Work within the time constraints for each section, without skipping ahead or returning to previous sections. Once the test is complete, wait for the proctor to collect and account for all test materials before you are dismissed. Remember, your test experience may differ from those around you due to variations in test book sections.

Usually, there are two breaks during the test: one for 10 minutes and another for 5 minutes. These are the only times you can consume food and drinks. Keep your ID and admission ticket with you at all times. All test materials must remain on your desk during breaks, and you cannot use break times to use electronic devices, as doing so could result in score cancellation.

Testing typically concludes around noon.

Electronic Devices

It's essential to respect rules around mobile phones and other electronic devices. Violation of these policies may result in immediate dismissal, score cancellation, or both.

Remember the following:

• Test administrators may collect and hold prohibited devices during the test, including during breaks.
• If your device makes noise, or if you are seen using it or attempting to access it at any time, you risk immediate dismissal, score cancellation, and the possible confiscation of your device.
• The College Board is not liable for loss or damage to personal items, including electronic devices, at the test center.

The SAT test lasts a total of 3 hours without the essay and 3 hours 50 minutes with the essay, including breaks.

The time allotted for each SAT section is 65 minutes for Reading, 35 minutes for Writing and Language, 25 minutes and 55 minutes for Math (with two separate sections), and 50 minutes for the optional Essay.

Improving your speed during the SAT involves knowing the format of the test, practicing time management strategies, identifying your strengths and weaknesses, and completing practice questions under timed conditions.

Preparing for SAT test day involves familiarizing yourself with the format and timing of the SAT, practicing with sample tests, getting a good night's sleep, eating a healthy breakfast, and ensuring you arrive at the testing center with plenty of time to spare.

Yes, scheduled breaks are built into the SAT. There is one 10-minute and one 5-minute break during the test.

If you don't finish a section in the given time, you will have to move on to the next one. Unanswered questions can negatively impact your score, so it's crucial to manage your time effectively.

Yes, you are allowed to bring a watch to the test center. However, the watch cannot have a separate timing device, cannot make noise, and cannot be a smartwatch.

Effective time management strategies include: understanding the test format, prioritizing questions, practicing pacing, using the process of elimination, and not spending too much time on a single question.

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Time pressure can bring out your worst instincts as an SAT test-taker.  After all, how often on a high school English or Math test do you have one minute or less to answer a question?

Learn how to budget your time on each section of the SAT , and get the pacing tips you need for the score of your dreams.

How Long Does the SAT Take?

The SAT clocks in at 3 hours (3 hours and 15 minutes with breaks). And if you choose to sign up for the optional essay , the SAT takes 3 hours and 50 minutes to complete (or 4 hours, 5 minutes with breaks).

SAT Test Length by Section

How are those 3 hours broken up by section? Here’s what your SAT test day schedule looks like:

Tips for SAT Pacing

Are you ready for your SAT date ? The biggest mistake many test-takers make is to spend too little time on the easy and medium questions, and too much time on the hard ones. The problem with this approach is that if you rush through the easy and medium questions, you are almost certain to make a few careless mistakes. Here are the pacing steps that will help you improve your score.

1. Slow Down, Score More

You’re not scored on how many questions you do . You’re scored on how many questions you answer correctly . Doing fewer questions can mean more correct answers overall!

2. Mimic the Real Thing

When you take practice tests, time yourself exactly as you will be timed on the real SAT. Develop a sense of how long 35 minutes is, for example, and how much time you can afford to spend on cracking difficult problems. If you know ahead of time what to expect, you won’t be as nervous.

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3. Don’t Get Bogged Down on the Tough Questions

Don’t let yourself get trapped by hard or time-consuming questions. Stop the part of your brain that says, “But I’ve already spent so much time working on this question . . .  I know I can finish it!” If you’re stumped or running short on time, guess and move on. Learn more SAT tips for completing questions out of order. 

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How Long the SAT Is and How to Manage That Time

The college admissions test is three hours long and divided into three sections.

Getty Images

Students have 1 minute and 10 seconds per question, but some problems on the SAT exam are more difficult and may require additional time.

For some students, the SAT may seem like it lasts forever, but the exam actually lasts three hours.

That time doesn't include one 10-minute break and one five-minute break. Experts say that how time is managed on each section is key to earning a high score.

"Don't think the clock is your enemy; you need to know how to work it," says Jed Applerouth, founder and president of Georgia-based Applerouth Tutoring Services LLC, which offers SAT prep as one of its services.

The test consists of three sections: reading, writing and language, and math. The 65-minute reading section is comprised of 52 multiple-choice questions; the writing and language section that lasts 35 minutes has 44 multiple-choice questions; and the 80-minute math test features 58 questions, 45 of which are multiple-choice and 13 that require a student-produced response.

Until recently, the SAT included an optional essay that added another 50 minutes. The essay, which experts note wasn't widely required by colleges, will no longer be available after June. Optional subject tests that each take an hour to complete have also been cut, though international students will still be able to take them in May and June.

While the majority of colleges were no longer requiring the SAT essay , many students still opted in. According to data from the College Board, which administers the SAT, 57% of nearly 2.2 million test-takers from the class of 2020 completed the essay. That number was higher in the prior year, which unlike 2020 wasn't marked by mass test date cancellations prompted by the coronavirus pandemic. For the class of 2019, 64% of the more than 2.2 million students who took the SAT that year completed the essay.

Dropping the optional essay will likely benefit students, some test prep experts say.

"Eliminating the SAT essay will save students time: preparation time, practice time, and time on official administrations. That will benefit students," Applerouth says. "Students will no longer need to save as much time on a Saturday to give to testing. They'll be getting an hour of their day back each time they have a practice or official test. That is meaningful. And shorter tests require less mental stamina."

Additionally, Applerouth says, "eliminating SAT subject tests will simply save students time and energy they would have invested in preparation and practice. This simplifies preparation and the testing calendar."

Time Management on the SAT

Part of a successful test strategy, experts say, includes knowing how much time should be spent on each question. Students have an average of about 1 minute and 10 seconds per question, but some problems on the SAT exam are more difficult and may take longer.

"You should allocate your time toward answering those easy questions that you can knock out first, and then go back to the hard questions, which you can answer later, which involves more time allocation," says Mai Jumamil, former director of college prep programs at New York-based Kaplan Test Prep. "You have to sort out these types of questions that you're answering, understand the difficulty level and be able to answer accordingly with that time constraint."

Experts caution students against spending too much time at the beginning of each section and not leaving enough for later questions.

"I think they are spending too much time early on second-guessing themselves, going back and forth, and before they know it, they've lost that time," says Joe Korfmacher, director of college counseling at Collegewise, an admissions consulting company headquartered in California.

For time-strapped students, one option is to simply guess in order to answer as many questions as possible. While not an ideal scenario, Korfmacher notes that the SAT no longer has a guessing penalty , which may allow students to raise their scores slightly when they are running out of time.

Applerouth also advises test-takers to learn their natural pacing. With practice, he says, students can learn how long it takes them to answer questions and be able to gauge when a minute or so has passed.

"Your watch is definitely one of your key tools to help with time management," Applerouth says.

Keep in mind, however, test-day restrictions such as a ban on devices that can be used to record, transmit, receive or play back content. The College Board lists restrictions on smartwatches and other prohibited materials on its Test Day Checklist webpage .

Other advice offered by the College Board includes what to bring, what to expect and when to arrive. According to the College Board website, test center doors open at 7:45 a.m. and testing begins between 8:30 and 9 a.m. Dismissal is typically around noon.

How to Get Ready for Test Day

Outside of test-taking and time-management strategies, experts say other factors can influence a student's SAT score.

A common performance handicap for busy high school students? Lack of sleep, test-prep pros say.

"It's essential that students get enough sleep because that is going to affect their ability to sustain that focus for that period of time," Applerouth says.

He adds that high school students aren't typically asked to lock into one task for three hours. Success, he says, often requires several rounds of practice tests to develop the endurance to focus for that long.

"A lot of the practice is building that cognitive muscle to stay focused," Applerouth says.

Another overlooked factor that can lower an SAT score ? Hunger. Applerouth encourages students to bring a snack to enjoy during each break to keep their energy and glucose levels up, which will help them power through the long exam.

Keeping stress levels down is also important, says Korfmacher, who has heard of students using meditation and other calming techniques. Students should remain relaxed and confident, he says, knowing that they have prepared well for the exam.

"I tell my kids that half the battle is to just believe in yourself," Korfmacher says.

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How Long Is the SAT? 2023 Ultimate Guide

Aaron • Last updated on January 4, 2023

Are you planning to take the SAT soon? 

Before taking the exam, it is essential for you to know the SAT time limit as this is an essential part of your test preparation. In taking the SAT, you need to know more than just how to answer the questions and score high. It’s also crucial that you learn strategies for time management and pacing.

In this SAT time breakdown, we will answer the question: How long is the SAT test? We will identify the SAT time per section and how you can use the time to answer the test more efficiently. 

How long does the SAT take?

The SAT has three sections: Reading, Writing and Language, and Math. The Math section consists of 2 tests: with a calculator and without. The SAT test length is 180 minutes or 3 hours, excluding the time for breaks. 

The optional Essay section, on the other hand, runs for 50 minutes. 

Below is the detailed breakdown of the times per SAT section:

What time does the SAT start?

The SAT begins around 8:30 to 9:00 am, depending on how long the preliminary procedure and reading of instructions will take. The testing center doors open at 7:45 am and close at exactly 8 am. 

Once you get inside the testing room, your electronic devices (except your calculator) and your bag will first be collected by the proctor. As soon as everyone is settled down and seated, the test materials are then distributed and the instructions read. 

Breaks during the SAT

Students need to take a break, especially during an intense and lengthy exam like the SAT. How long is the SAT with breaks included? 

The first break is 10 minutes long and will take place between the Reading section and the Writing and Language section. The next break, which is 5 minutes, will be between the two Math sections. 

For those taking the Essay section, a 2-minute break will be given after the Math test. 

Here is the SAT test time breakdown including the breaks:

You can use the breaks to leave the room, eat a snack, or use the restroom. 

Most testing centers include an additional experimental section as the last section on the SAT ( 1 ). This is for pretesting purposes. Do not worry much about it, though, for this section is NOT counted in the scoring process.

When will you finish the SAT?

The SAT time length is 3 hours and the breaks run for 15 minutes total. If you take the Essay section, you should finish between 12:15 and12:45 pm, depending on the time spent on the preliminary procedure and reading of instructions. If you are taking the Essay section, you should finish between 1:00 and 1:30 pm. 

Once your exam has concluded, the proctor will return your electronic devices and bag. 

How can you prepare for the lengthy SAT?

If you choose to take the Essay section, the SAT would take you nearly 4 hours to finish it. This is pretty long and will feel even longer when you’re nervous. What are the things that you can do to prepare for the long and intense SAT and to keep anxiety at bay?

Answer full-length practice tests

One of the most effective ways to prepare for the SAT is to answer full-length practice tests ( 2 ). These will help you get a good grasp of the actual test structure. Also, you will learn how to manage your time properly and efficiently so you can answer all the questions within the given timeframe. 

In answering SAT practice tests, it would be better to use official practice tests provided by the College Board. This is because the questions are similar to those of the actual standardized test. 

You should also answer newly released official practice tests. Doing so will give you an idea of the latest structure and flow. 

Time yourself

When answering a full-length practice test, time yourself. Now that you know how much time is allocated per section and the entire SAT, you can pace yourself accordingly. It is also recommended that you take breaks just like during the actual SAT. 

Timing yourself during the practice test will let you know how fast you can answer a certain section. If you find the allotted time insufficient, you can make adjustments to your answering process beforehand. 

With the given SAT test time and the number of questions per section, you will be able to calculate the average time per question, in which you can pattern your pace. 

Here is the average time you per question in each section:

Put into practice, you will be able to answer the SAT more efficiently. 

Time management on the SAT

Say, you are answering the actual SAT, how are you going to manage your time? 

According to US News ( 3 ), one of the most effective ways to take the SAT is to answer the easy questions first. Then, you can go back to the harder ones later. This way, you can allot more time to the more difficult questions. 

Experts also suggest that you use a watch to monitor your pace. Knowing the time given per section, you will be able to manage your time better. 

Stamina will also play a huge role in the SAT. The old SAT consisted of 10 small sections. In today’s standardized admissions test, subjects are distributed into four large sections. In answering questions in each section, it will be important for you to not only answer the questions quickly but to also keep the same pace throughout the test. 

Final thoughts

Now that you know how long the SAT takes, you can prepare for the test more efficiently and effectively. Being aware of the breakdown of the SAT exam time is going to be important for you. The SAT is a lengthy test, but always remember to stay relaxed and confident. Aside from your knowledge of concepts and theories, your time management will be crucial in attaining your goals on the SAT. 

• https://blog.prepscholar.com/what-is-the-sat-experimental-section
• https://collegereadiness.collegeboard.org/sat/practice/full-length-practice-tests
• https://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/articles/2019-02-22/how-long-the-sat-is-and-how-to-manage-that-time

How Long Is the SAT?

Last Updated on April 20, 2023

The SAT booklet is the same length and width as standard U.S. Letter paper. So, the SAT is about 11 inches long (and 8.5 inches wide) … Ha!

Now that we’re all smiling, let’s dive into the two closely interrelated meanings of “How long is the SAT?” that you came here for:

• Duration: How much time does the SAT take ?
• Total volume: How many questions are on the SAT?

We’ll also touch on other factors related to SAT timing, including scheduled start time, breaks, and proctors’ warnings.

Here are the topics we’ll cover:

What is the total testing time, how long does the sat last, start to finish, how long will i spend in the test center.

• What Warnings Will My Proctor Give?

When Should I Get to the Test Center?

Who completes the essay, what is the length of the sat with essay, what’s next.

Let’s start by taking a look at how long each section of the SAT is.

How Long Are the SAT Test Sections?

The 2022-2023 SAT will have four sections. As shown on the College Board website , the sections will always appear in the same order, with the following durations:

The total testing time for all four sections of the 2022-2023 SAT (without the essay)—for the test sections only, NOT counting breaks—is 180 minutes.

The total testing time for the 2022-2023 SAT (without the essay) is exactly 3 hours.

When Are the Breaks During the SAT?

There are two scheduled breaks between sections:

• Between Sections 1 and 2 , the two verbal sections, you’ll get a 10-minute break .
• Between Sections 3 and 4 , the two math sections , you’ll get a 5-minute break .

Pay attention to the designated areas where you need to stay during the SAT. During these two breaks, you’ll most likely be restricted to the testing area, restrooms, and the adjoining hallway. If you stray from the designated areas, or if you’re overheard discussing any part of the exam with others, you’ll be dismissed and your scores will be voided!

Including breaks, the 2022-2023 SAT will last 195 minutes, or 3 hours and 15 minutes.

This is definitely more of a marathon than a sprint! So, at home before the test, be sure to eat a nutritious, well-balanced meal that is rich in both protein and complex carbohydrates. (But don’t stuff yourself.) This type of meal will be the ideal breakfast to fuel your brain for the duration of the SAT, so you’re unlikely to ‘crash’ partway through the test or experience big swings in your alertness. A balanced breakfast can also help regulate your stress levels during the SAT .

From start to finish, including breaks, the 2022-2023 SAT lasts for 3 hours and 15 minutes.

The entire duration of your 2022-2023 SAT experience on test day will include the time needed for preliminary procedures: filling out your personal information on the answer sheet, signing and dating your forms, and going over rules and procedures with your proctor.

These initial formalities should take about half an hour, for a grand total of 3 hours and 45 minutes of closed-door time inside the test center.

Since you can be admitted up to 15 minutes early, you could be inside the test center for up to 4 hours.

How Can I Track Time During the SAT?

Your testing area should have at least one clock prominently displayed where you can easily see it without having to wheel around or crane your neck.

In addition, your proctor will issue a predetermined set of time cues out loud for all test-takers to hear.

What Time Warnings Will My Proctor Give?

Here is the entire slate of time cues that your proctor will be instructed to speak aloud.

SECTION 1: Reading (65 minutes)

At the beginning: Time starts now.

After 30 minutes: You have 35 minutes remaining in Section 1.

After 60 minutes: You have 5 minutes remaining in Section 1.

After 65 minutes: Please stop work and put your pencil down.

10-Minute Break

The proctor should post the clock time that ends the break, when testing will resume. The proctor will not be required to give any time cues out loud during the break.

SECTION 2: Writing & Language (35 minutes)

After 15 minutes: You have 20 minutes remaining in Section 2.

After 30 minutes: You have 5 minutes remaining in Section 2.

After 35 minutes: Please stop work and put your pencil down.

SECTION 3: Math, No Calculator (25 minutes)

After 10 minutes: You have 15 minutes remaining in Section 3.

After 20 minutes: You have 5 minutes remaining in Section 3.

After 25 minutes: Please stop work and put your pencil down.

5-Minute Break

The proctor should post the time when testing will resume. The proctor will not necessarily issue any cues aloud.

SECTION 4: Math, With Calculator (55 minutes)

After 25 minutes: You have 30 minutes remaining in Section 4.

After 50 minutes: You have 5 minutes remaining in Section 4.

After 55 minutes: Please stop work and put your pencil down.

Your proctor will issue spoken time warnings on the schedule above. These will be valuable no matter what, but especially if there is any issue with the clocks in your testing room.

For Saturday administrations of the 2022-2023 SAT, the doors at your test center will open by 7:45 AM. The doors will close at 8:00 AM sharp.

Don’t be late! If you arrive after the doors close, you’ll be turned away and your test will be canceled.

What About the Optional Essay?

The optional SAT essay of previous years is no more. The weekend administrations of the 2022-2023 SAT, on nationwide test dates, will not offer an essay section.

However, there is a small group of test-takers in certain states who will, in fact, see an essay on their 2022-2023 SAT. If you’re one of these test-takers, you’ll write the essay as an additional section, after you finish the four sections that make up the SAT without essay.

The only 2022-2023 SAT administrations with an essay will be given during school hours, in states that have adopted the SAT as part of their mandatory statewide 11th grade public-school assessment testing. These states are Colorado, Delaware, Illinois, Michigan, New Hampshire, and Oklahoma.

If you’re a rising junior at a public high school in one of these states, you’ll take the SAT with essay at school sometime in March or April 2023. If that’s you, please check with your high school guidance counselor or your college admissions advisor for exact test dates and times.

If you’re one of the “chosen few” who will take the 2022-2023 SAT with essay, you’ll have all the same timings and proctor cues as above, plus an additional 2-minute break and a 50-minute period during which to plan and write your essay.

Therefore, for these in-school administrations, the following times apply:

• The total testing time will be 230 minutes (3 hours and 50 minutes).
• The total duration from start to finish will be 247 minutes (4 hours and 7 minutes).
• Your total time spent inside the testing area will be at least 277 minutes (4 hours and 37 minutes).

Good luck, and enjoy your test prep!

Now that you know everything about SAT testing time, check out some tips for motivating yourself to study for the SAT .

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About The Author

Ron is an inveterate strategist who has always delighted in discovering ‘hacks’ in every corner of his life—cracking standardized tests, charting optimal routes through Southern California's infamous traffic, finding and negotiating bargains, tweaking his own diet and sleep patterns, and more. And in his very first teaching job, back in high school sharing SAT strategies with his own classmates, Ron found the same passion for paying his accumulated knowledge forward. Since those days, Ron has taught in high-school and college classrooms, coached youth track-and-field athletes, and, of course, made a career in test preparation. Ron enjoys long trips on the open road; a bewildering variety of music, from classical to hip-hop to forró to electrocumbia; sharp, well-fitted, and slightly idiosyncratic outfit choices, on himself and others alike; 105-115ºF (40-45ºC) summer days with endless sunshine; and, most of all, building a life with his wife, muse, and kindred spirit, Sarah.

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The SAT Essay: Should You Take It?

Should you take the sat essay in 2021.

NOTE: The SAT Essay no longer exists as of 2024. The SAT has transitioned into a new digital format, which is radically different. For an updated guide to the new digital SAT, follow the link here.

The SAT Essay is optional. Students do not have to sit for it. In fact, they must elect to take the Essay when registering for the SAT. This costs an additional $15 .

Plenty of U.S. universities and colleges do not require the SAT Essay, including Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Stanford, Dartmouth, and Brown. But in the context of college admissions, “optional” often takes on a whole new meaning. 

What’s more, the CollegeBoard will now be discontinuing the SAT Essay following the June 2021 SAT administration .

Should you take the SAT essay between now and 2021? Or should you pass on it and spend those 50 minutes elsewhere?

In this article, we answer these questions and more.

Here’s what we cover:

The SAT Essay: The Basics

• How We’ve Approached the Essay Until Now (2021)
• Should You Take the Essay Between Now and June 2021?

If they’ve registered for it, students take the SAT essay after they have completed the first 4 sections of the test. The Essay portion is 50 minutes long (as opposed to the old SAT’s 25-minute essay section) and is hand-written.

The Purpose of the SAT Essay

According to the College Board, the SAT essay is “about the real world.”

The SAT Essay is a lot like a typical college writing assignment in which you’re asked to analyze a text. Take the SAT with Essay and show colleges that you’re ready to come to campus and write.

Yes, students must write analytically after nearly three hours of testing, when their brains are significantly fatigued! Nonetheless, the SAT essay is designed to showcase a student’s writing capabilities in the context of college preparedness .

Source : College Board

Notice how students are not asked whether or not they agree with the author’s argument. Nor are they asked to assess its logical soundness.

They must simply identify the tools or “rhetorical devices” the author uses to make his/her argument persuasive.

Passages will be similar in length and style to those on the Evidence-Based Reading test of the SAT, although notably more argumentative in nature. Many essay passages are speeches or editorials. These can be from any century.

SAT Essay Scoring

Two separate readers will assess students’ essays and score these in three categories:

• and Writing

They will award 1-4 points for each category. The SAT test graders then add the two scores for each category. Here’s an example:

A student’s SAT essay scores do not impact their SAT composite score or Verbal section score. Essay scores appear separately on the score report itself. These do not include a composite score or percentiles.

Our Historic Approach to the SAT Essay (pre-2021)

Before the CollegeBoard announced that it would be discontinuing the SAT Essay in June 2021, these were our thoughts on this optional section of the test.

First things first, plenty of institutions have dropped their requirement of the SAT or ACT essays due to the financial obstacle it may pose to some students. As we’ve already mentioned, the SAT essay requires $15 on top of the exam’s registration fee of $49.50. ( Fee waivers do exist.)

Yet some colleges have sometimes filled the SAT essay gap with something else, such as supplemental writing materials .  Despite not requiring it, a dwindling number of institutions have “recommended” that students take the essay if they have the means to do so.

College Application Requirements 

In the past, the CollegeBoard has been quick to emphasize that taking the SAT Essay enables students to apply to schools that “recommend or require it.” 

Indeed, some of the colleges on students’ lists may have different policies and/or requirements when it comes to the SAT Essay. 

If you do use this tool, be sure to confirm essay policies with what colleges specify on their websites.  

Essay Alternatives

Some colleges have requested an alternative to the SAT essay in past admission cycles.

While Princeton University has not historically required the SAT or ACT essay, it does request a graded academic writing sample from all applicants. This is designed to “ assess the student’s written expression in an academic setting” and “further the holistic understanding of the student’s application.”

Other universities, such as Harvard , permit applicants to supplement their applications with academic papers, research projects, and other scholarly documents of which they are the sole author. 

In other words, colleges are keen to assess students’ writing capacities, SAT/ACT essay aside.

SAT Test Prep

The essay does incorporate much of what both SAT verbal sections already test: expression of ideas, logical organization, critical analysis of a text, and author’s intent.

Students who prepare for both SAT verbal sections will thus already be poised for success on the essay!  In this sense, studying for the SAT essay nicely complements any SAT test prep timeline and curriculum. 

AP English students may also be at an advantage for the SAT essay. The prompt’s focus on argument and rhetorical devices frequently aligns with AP English curriculum, making essay prep more straightforward. 

Taking the SAT Essay in 2021

The CollegeBoard will no longer offer the SAT Essay after the June administration of the SAT.

In the past, we’ve encouraged students to take the Essay to keep their options open, especially those applying to more selective colleges. We haven’t advised  spending too much time preparing for the Essay, however.

Now what? S hould you even consider signing up for the SAT Essay since it’s going away in six months?

In general, plan on taking the SAT Essay if:

• You have already significantly prepared for the essay at this point in your SAT test prep
• You’ve taken the SAT essay once and plan on taking the SAT at least one more time before or on June 2021
• You plan on taking the SAT at least twice by June 2021  (this allows for SuperScoring with Essay)
• You desperately wish to showcase your writing skills and/or
• You have substantial extra prep time (i.e., preparing for the Essay won’t compromise your prep for other more valuable sections)

We recommend that you skip the essay if:

• You are just starting your test prep journey now
• You plan on taking the SAT after the June administration, at least one time
• At least one college on your list requires an essay alternative (such as an academic paper)
• You’ve already taken the essay at least twice and/or
• Your time is better spent preparing for the required sections of the SAT (Math, Reading, Writing & Language)

At the end of the day, colleges are likely to still be interested in applicants’ ability to write well and think critically.

That’s why we encourage students to spend time honing their personal statements , in-class academic papers, and supplemental essay responses , regardless of their history with the SAT Essay.

Kate is a graduate of Princeton University. Over the last decade, Kate has successfully mentored hundreds of students in all aspects of the college admissions process, including the SAT, ACT, and college application essay.

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The Admissions Strategist

How long is the sat the excellent guide to test success.

The Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) is important for admission to college. It’s also notoriously challenging.

But it’s not just the content that makes the SAT tough . It’s also the fact that the test is 3-4 hours long and can be mentally draining.

• Plus, you have to answer a lot of questions in that 3-4 hours, and many students have a hard time completing all of them.

In this article, we’ll talk about how long the SAT is, how to pace yourself, and how you can build the stamina you need to power through the test.

Click above to watch a video on the SAT.

How long is each section of the SAT?

You can take the SAT either with or without the optional essay. In most cases, it’s best to sign up for the optional essay, since some schools do require it.

Without the essay, the SAT is three hours and 15 minutes long (including breaks).

With the optional essay, the SAT is four hours and five minutes long (including breaks).

Here’s the breakdown of each section:

• Reading: 65 minutes, 52 questions
• Writing and Language: 35 minutes, 44 questions
• Math, No Calculator: 25 minutes, 20 questions
• Math, Calculator: 55 minutes, 38 questions
• Essay: 50 minutes, 1 question

Math is the only section that’s divided into two parts. For one portion, no calculators are allowed.

For the second part, you’re permitted to use an approved calculator.

How long are the SAT breaks?

If you sign up to write the essay, you’ll get three breaks. If not, you’ll have two breaks during the exam.

The breaks are:

• A 10-minute break between the Reading section and the Writing and Language section
• A five-minute break between the two Math sections
• A two-minute break after Math, Calculator if you’re staying for the essay

What should I do during my breaks?

The breaks are your chance to catch your breath, rest your mind, and recharge.

None of the breaks are extremely long, but be sure to take advantage of them.

As tempting as it may be, don’t spend your breaks agonizing over any questions or trying to analyze how you’re doing so far.

• You’re supposed to be taking a break!
• The length of the test can be grueling, and you need these breaks to help you stay focused and refreshed throughout.

Remember that the breaks get shorter as the test goes on. During the two-minute break before the essay, you won’t be allowed to leave the room.

• It’s a quick stretch break at your desk.
• So, be sure to use the restroom during the five-minute break between Math sections.

Aside from using the restroom, you can use your breaks to drink water, eat a snack, and walk around a bit to stretch your legs and rest your mind.

• Try to bring some brain-boosting snacks like fruits and/or nuts. Avoid sugary snacks that can set you up for a crash.

And remember to follow the rules during breaks: Don’t talk about the test, and don’t try to access any of your devices (e.g. cell phone).

Even though it’s a break, your test may be invalidated if you’re seen breaking the rules.

What time does the SAT start and end?

At all SAT test centers, doors open at 7:45 a.m. and close at 8:00 a.m., unless another time is noted on your admission ticket.

• Once testing has started, you won’t be allowed in and will have to reschedule or re-register. (Rescheduling is much cheaper.)

Testing will start between 8:30 a.m. and 9:00 a.m.

• The test coordinator will read all testing instructions from a manual, answer any questions related to testing procedures, and then tell you when to start and stop working on each section.

There may be slight variations on when the test ends, depending on how long it takes to review instructions and other factors.

• In general, you can expect to stay until around noon if you aren’t writing the essay and around 1:00 p.m. if you are completing the essay section.

So, the short answer:

• The SAT starts between 8:30 a.m. and 9:00 a.m. and typically ends around 12:00 p.m. or 1:00 p.m., depending on whether you’re writing the essay.

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How much time should i spend on each sat question.

You might think you can answer this question by dividing the number of questions per section by the amount of time you’ll have to answer them.

But it’s not quite that simple.

Let’s look at how you should pace yourself on each section of the SAT.

The Reading section is 65 minutes long and consists of 52 questions. More importantly, it contains five passages (each with associated questions).

• On average, you should spend 13 minutes per passage .
• This includes reading the passage and answering the questions that accompany it.
• If you want a few minutes to review at the end, aim to spend about 12 minutes per passage.

It’s best to dedicate about five of those minutes to reading the passage. Passages are 500-750 words long.

• Spend much more time, and you risk running out of time on the questions.

Spend fewer than five minutes reading, and you may overlook key information.

Writing and Language

The Writing and Language section is 35 minutes long and consists of 44 questions.

• These questions are spread out over four passages.

The Writing and Language passages are shorter than the Reading passages (400-450 words).

Try to spend eight minutes per passage , allowing about three minutes for review at the end.

Math, No Calculator

The Math, No Calculator section consists of 15 multiple choice questions and five grid-in questions.

You have 25 minutes to answer these 20 questions.

• An equal division of time would give you 75 seconds to answer each question.
• However, it’s important to note that this section is arranged in order of difficulty, with the most challenging questions coming at the end of the section.

For that reason, it’s a good idea to spend 60 seconds on each question when possible, allowing slightly more time for the most difficult questions.

Math, Calculator

The Math, Calculator section is also arranged by order of difficulty, with the most challenging questions appearing at the end of the section.

• You have 55 minutes to complete this section, and it consists of 30 multiple choice questions and eight grid-in questions.
• An equal division of time would give you 80 seconds per question, with about four minutes to check over your answers at the end.

When possible, try to spend closer to 65-70 seconds on each question, so that you can devote more time to the more complex questions at the end.

How do I prepare for the length of the SAT?

The content of the SAT is difficult, but one of the most challenging aspects of the exam is the grueling length and the stamina required to complete it.

How can you increase your focus, concentration, and stamina for the four-hour exam?

Well, the process is similar to increasing your stamina for a sport. You’ll have to practice!

• Take full-length, timed practice SAT tests. Even practice taking breaks. You’ll get used to the structure and format, and you’ll get a feel for how to pace yourself on exam day.
• Time yourself on individual sections too. This way, you can identify areas of weakness and brush up on the sections where you need the most practice. You can devise strategies to help you speed up (and maintain your accuracy) on the sections that give you the most trouble.
• Have a plan. Make a plan for what you’ll do if you get stuck on a question or if you start to feel overwhelmed during the test. For example, you might take a few deep breaths. Remember that very few people will answer every question correctly. After more than a minute or so has passed, you’ll need to move on. Once you move on, don’t spend time dwelling on the last question. Focus on one question at a time.

By practicing taking a full-length test, getting your pacing right, and working on strategies to help you stay “in the zone,” you’ll build stamina and the ability to work under pressure.

How long are SAT II exams?

The SAT Subject Tests (SAT II) are all hour-long exams. All questions are multiple choice, but the number of questions varies.

• For instance, the Literature exam is about 60 questions long, while the World History exam consists of 95 questions.

There are no breaks during an individual SAT Subject Test. However, you can take up to three Subject Tests during one testing session.

If you take multiple tests, you do get a five-minute break between each one.

What can I bring with me to the SAT and SAT II exams?

Whether you’re taking the SAT or an SAT II exam, you should bring:

• Admission Ticket
• Two No. 2 pencils with erasers
• Approved calculator (if your test will include mathematics)
• Water and snacks

If you’re taking an SAT II Language with Listening test, you may also be expected to bring an approved CD player.

Do not bring:

• Your cell phone
• Any recording device or personal computing device (e.g. tablet or laptop)
• Cameras or other photographic equipment
• A separate timer of any kind

If you absolutely must bring a cell phone (for instance, to contact a parent to pick you up when the test is finished), turn it off and leave it inside a bag, backpack, or purse until your test is complete.

Don’t check it, even during breaks. If it makes a noise during the test, your test could be invalidated.

How should I plan my day for the SAT test?

If you’re like most people, you’ll be feeling nervous the morning of the test. Planning ahead can help you reduce some of your test-day jitters.

The Day Before

Don’t study the day or night before the test. By now, you know what you’re going to know. Let your brain rest.

In addition:

• Plan in advance for how you’ll get to the testing site. It’s even a good idea to drive to the site to see how long it’ll take you and to familiarize yourself with the route. If you’ll need to leave extra time to find parking or to locate your testing room in the building, plan for that as well.
• Eat a healthy and filling dinner , like pasta, rice, vegetables, and potatoes. Drink lots of water too.
• Organize your bag or backpack the day before the test with all the materials you’ll need. Double check that you’ve packed your Admission Ticket, your ID, some pencils, and a calculator if needed.
• Set out your outfit the night before , giving you one less thing to worry about in the morning. It’s a good idea to bring a sweater in case the testing room is chilly.

The Day of the Test

• Wake up early and give yourself time for a nutritious breakfast. Good options include eggs, toast, fruit, oatmeal, yogurt, and/or a bagel.
• Get to the testing center early. Leave yourself time to settle in, instead of feeling like you’re scrambling all morning.
• While you wait, take deep breaths and remember all the preparation you’ve put in. You’ve got this!
• Plan to leave the testing center around 12:00 or 1:00, depending on whether you’re writing the essay. Don’t make solid after-test plans any time before 1:00-2:00, however, as some tests may run slightly later.

Advice From a College Expert

From Beth Daniel Lindsay, director of academic advising and accessibility services coordinator at Sweet Briar College:

As with many things in life, practice makes perfect. In this case, I’d change that to practice makes better…very few people score perfectly on the SAT! Students preparing to take the SAT should take practice tests in realistic settings (i.e. at the same time as the SAT and with breaks at the same times). The test starts early in the morning, so get used to that. For most students, there are two breaks: one for ten minutes and one for five. Don’t take extra breaks because you won’t be able to do that on test day. The College Board has eight practice tests available for free online. Focus only on one section at a time, just like you will need to on test day. Students are not allowed to skip ahead if they finish early or to go back to earlier sections to recheck their work. Put your phone and any other electronic device away, again, just like on test day. This means that ideally, you will need someone to time you, not your phone. Consider asking a parent, guardian or family friend to do this for you and for one or more friends at the same time. Most students take the SAT in a room with other students, so this is another good opportunity to practice. During the exam, take deep breaths to calm your nerves. If you have a meditation practice, now is a good time to do some very brief meditation. Put aside other concerns and focus on the test. Remember the hierarchy of needs, too: eat a healthy, filling dinner the night before and a healthy, filling breakfast the morning of the test. Bring snacks like a granola bar or nuts — relatively healthy and easy to pack. Don’t assume there will be vending machines at the test center. Get plenty of sleep. Drink some water, but not so much that you’ll need extra breaks because they won’t be available. Try not to worry. If you’ve practiced, you’ve done all that you can and worrying excessively isn’t going to help. When it comes to high-stakes tests like the SAT, I don’t believe in saying good luck. With the right preparation and mindset, you don’t need luck. So, I wish you success!

Conclusion: How Long Is the SAT?

The SAT can feel both too long and too short. It’s difficult to stay focused and high performing for several hours straight, but it can also be a struggle to get to every single question.

It’s helpful to:

• Familiarize yourself with the length and ideal pacing of each section
• Take full-length, timed practice tests
• Time yourself on each individual section as well
• Develop calming strategies to help you stay focused during the test
• Plan ahead to make your test day run as smoothly as possible
• Take full advantage of your breaks on test day

Follow these strategies, and you’ll maximize your ability to answer questions both correctly and efficiently.

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How Long the SAT Is and How to Manage That Time

U.S. News & World Report

February 3, 2021, 12:00 AM

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For some students, the SAT may seem like it lasts forever, but the exam actually lasts three hours.

That time doesn’t include one 10-minute break and one five-minute break. Experts say that how time is managed on each section is key to earning a high score.

“Don’t think the clock is your enemy; you need to know how to work it,” says Jed Applerouth, founder and president of Georgia-based Applerouth Tutoring Services LLC, which offers SAT prep as one of its services.

The test consists of three sections: reading, writing and language, and math. The 65-minute reading section is comprised of 52 multiple-choice questions; the writing and language section that lasts 35 minutes has 44 multiple-choice questions; and the 80-minute math test features 58 questions, 45 of which are multiple-choice and 13 that require a student-produced response.

[ Read: 6 SAT Math Problem Solving and Data Analysis Concepts to Master. ]

Until recently, the SAT included an optional essay that added another 50 minutes. The essay, which experts note wasn’t widely required by colleges, will no longer be available after June. Optional subject tests that each take an hour to complete have also been cut, though international students will still be able to take them in May and June.

While the majority of colleges were no longer requiring the SAT essay , many students still opted in. According to data from the College Board, which administers the SAT, 57% of nearly 2.2 million test-takers from the class of 2020 completed the essay. That number was higher in the prior year, which unlike 2020 wasn’t marked by mass test date cancellations prompted by the coronavirus pandemic. For the class of 2019, 64% of the more than 2.2 million students who took the SAT that year completed the essay.

Dropping the optional essay will likely benefit students, some test prep experts say.

“Eliminating the SAT essay will save students time: preparation time, practice time, and time on official administrations. That will benefit students,” Applerouth says. “Students will no longer need to save as much time on a Saturday to give to testing. They’ll be getting an hour of their day back each time they have a practice or official test. That is meaningful. And shorter tests require less mental stamina.”

Additionally, Applerouth says, “eliminating SAT subject tests will simply save students time and energy they would have invested in preparation and practice. This simplifies preparation and the testing calendar.”

Time Management on the SAT

Part of a successful test strategy, experts say, includes knowing how much time should be spent on each question. Students have an average of about 1 minute and 10 seconds per question, but some problems on the SAT exam are more difficult and may take longer.

“You should allocate your time toward answering those easy questions that you can knock out first, and then go back to the hard questions, which you can answer later, which involves more time allocation,” says Mai Jumamil, former director of college prep programs at New York-based Kaplan Test Prep. “You have to sort out these types of questions that you’re answering, understand the difficulty level and be able to answer accordingly with that time constraint.”

Experts caution students against spending too much time at the beginning of each section and not leaving enough for later questions.

“I think they are spending too much time early on second-guessing themselves, going back and forth, and before they know it, they’ve lost that time,” says Joe Korfmacher, director of college counseling at Collegewise, an admissions consulting company headquartered in California.

For time-strapped students, one option is to simply guess in order to answer as many questions as possible. While not an ideal scenario, Korfmacher notes that the SAT no longer has a guessing penalty , which may allow students to raise their scores slightly when they are running out of time.

[ Read: Understand What’s a Good SAT Score for College Admissions. ]

Applerouth also advises test-takers to learn their natural pacing. With practice, he says, students can learn how long it takes them to answer questions and be able to gauge when a minute or so has passed.

“Your watch is definitely one of your key tools to help with time management,” Applerouth says.

Keep in mind, however, test-day restrictions such as a ban on devices that can be used to record, transmit, receive or play back content. The College Board lists restrictions on smartwatches and other prohibited materials on its Test Day Checklist webpage .

Other advice offered by the College Board includes what to bring, what to expect and when to arrive. According to the College Board website, test center doors open at 7:45 a.m. and testing begins between 8:30 and 9 a.m. Dismissal is typically around noon.

How to Get Ready for Test Day

Outside of test-taking and time-management strategies, experts say other factors can influence a student’s SAT score.

[ See: 10 Test Prep Tips for SAT and ACT Takers. ]

A common performance handicap for busy high school students? Lack of sleep, test-prep pros say.

“It’s essential that students get enough sleep because that is going to affect their ability to sustain that focus for that period of time,” Applerouth says.

He adds that high school students aren’t typically asked to lock into one task for three hours. Success, he says, often requires several rounds of practice tests to develop the endurance to focus for that long.

“A lot of the practice is building that cognitive muscle to stay focused,” Applerouth says.

Another overlooked factor that can lower an SAT score ? Hunger. Applerouth encourages students to bring a snack to enjoy during each break to keep their energy and glucose levels up, which will help them power through the long exam.

Keeping stress levels down is also important, says Korfmacher, who has heard of students using meditation and other calming techniques. Students should remain relaxed and confident, he says, knowing that they have prepared well for the exam.

“I tell my kids that half the battle is to just believe in yourself,” Korfmacher says.

Searching for a college? Get our complete rankings of Best Colleges.

More from U.S. News

25 Colleges With the Highest SAT Scores

3 Tips to Avoid Falling Behind on SAT, ACT Prep

Discover How to Align ACT, SAT Prep to Your Learning Style

How Long the SAT Is and How to Manage That Time originally appeared on usnews.com

Update 02/03/21: This article has been updated to reflect changes to the administration of the SAT essay and subject tests.

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How Long is the SAT and What to Expect on Test Day

The SAT exam is one of the most important standardized tests for students seeking admission to colleges and universities in the United States. The test measures a student's readiness for college and is divided into several sections, each with its own set of questions.

How Long is the SAT?

The SAT exam consists of two main sections: The Math section The Evidence-Based Reading and Writing section

The total time for both sections is three hours without the optional Essay section. With the optional Essay section, the total time increases to three hours and fifty minutes. Here is a breakdown of the SAT exam length by section:

• Evidence-Based Reading and Writing: 65 minutes
• Math: 80 minutes
• Optional Essay: 50 minutes

In addition to the above sections, there is also a 25-minute experimental section that is not scored. This section is used by the College Board to test new questions that may be used on future exams.

What to Expect on Test Day

On the day of the SAT exam, students should arrive at the testing center at least 30 minutes before the start of the exam. They should bring their admission ticket, photo ID, and two No. 2 pencils. Mechanical pencils, pens, highlighters, and other writing utensils are not allowed.

The test is administered in four timed sections, with breaks in between. The first section is the Evidence-Based Reading and Writing section, followed by a 10-minute break. Next is the Math section, followed by another 5-minute break. After the break, students will take the optional Essay section. Finally, there is a 2-minute break before the experimental section.

During the exam, students are not allowed to bring any electronic devices, including cell phones, smartwatches, and tablets. These devices must be turned off and stored in a designated area during the exam.

Another important factor to keep in mind is pacing. The SAT is a timed exam, and it's important to manage your time effectively to ensure that you can answer all of the questions. Each section is timed separately, with different time limits for each section. Here is a breakdown of the timing for each section of the SAT:

• Reading : 65 minutes, with 52 questions
• Writing and Language : 35 minutes, with 44 questions
• Math (No Calculator): 25 minutes, with 20 questions
• Math (Calculator): 55 minutes, with 38 questions

It's important to keep track of the time during the exam, so that you can pace yourself and ensure that you have enough time to answer all of the questions. However, you also want to avoid rushing through the questions and making careless mistakes. Make sure to take breaks when needed, and stay focused throughout the exam.

How Can You Prepare for the SAT Exam Length?

Preparing for the SAT exam length is important to ensure that you can manage your time effectively on test day. Here are some tips to help you prepare:

Practice Under Timed Conditions: When preparing for the SAT, it's important to practice under timed conditions to get used to the time limits for each section. Use practice exams or timed practice sessions to simulate the actual test day.

Use Time Management Strategies: Learn time management strategies such as skipping difficult questions and coming back to them later, or budgeting time for each question or section. Experiment with different strategies to find what works best for you.

Build Endurance: The SAT is a long exam, so building your endurance is key. Try taking longer practice exams or study sessions to help build your stamina.

Stay Focused: During the exam, it's important to stay focused and avoid distractions. Try practicing mindfulness or meditation techniques to help you stay centered and focused.

Get Plenty of Rest: Make sure to get plenty of rest before the exam to ensure that you are alert and focused on test day.

The SAT exam length can be daunting, but with the right preparation and mindset, you can successfully manage the time constraints and achieve your best score. Remember to practice under timed conditions, use time management strategies, build endurance, stay focused, and get plenty of rest. With these tips, you'll be on your way to a successful SAT exam day.

Frequently Asked Questions about the SAT and Its Duration:

How long is the sat test.

The SAT exam is 3 hours long, plus an additional 50 minutes for the optional essay. In total, with the essay, the SAT takes 3 hours and 50 minutes.

How is the time on the SAT divided among the sections?

The SAT is divided into two main sections: the Math section and the Evidence-Based Reading and Writing section. Each section is allotted 65 minutes. Additionally, there is an optional essay section, which is given an additional 50 minutes.

Are there breaks during the SAT?

Yes, there is one 10-minute break given after the completion of the Math section. During this break, students are allowed to use the restroom or eat a snack.

What if I need extra time to take the SAT?

Students with disabilities or documented conditions that affect their ability to take tests may be eligible for accommodations, such as extra time. However, these accommodations must be requested in advance and approved by the College Board.

Is the SAT test time limit strict?

Yes, the SAT test time limit is strict. Once the time for a section is over, students must stop working on that section and move on to the next. Additionally, students are not allowed to bring their own timing devices, such as watches, into the testing room.

What To Bring To SAT Testing?

How Long Is The SAT Test?

SAT Dates 2023-2024

What Is The Average SAT Score?

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SAT Essay Scores Explained

On january 19th, 2021, college board announced that they will no longer administer the sat subject tests in the u.s. and that the essay would be retired. read our blog post  to understand what this means in the near term and what the college board has in store for students down the road., our articles on subject tests and the sat essay will remain on our site for reference purposes as colleges and students transition to a revised testing landscape..

Why are there no percentiles for the essay on an SAT score report?

No percentiles or norms are provided in student reports. Even colleges do not receive any summary statistics. Given Compass’ concerns about the inaccuracy of essay scoring and the notable failures of the ACT on that front, the de-emphasis of norms would seem to be a good thing. The problem is that 10% of colleges are sticking with the SAT Essay as an admission requirement . While those colleges will not receive score distribution reports from the College Board, it is not difficult for them to construct their own statistics—officially or unofficially—based on thousands of applicants. Colleges can determine a “good score,” but students cannot. This asymmetry of information is harmful to students, as they are left to speculate how well they have performed and how their scores will be interpreted. Through our analysis, Compass hopes to provide students and parents more context for evaluating SAT Essay scores.

How has scoring changed? Is it still part of a student’s Total Score?

On the old SAT, the essay was a required component of the Writing section and made up approximately one-third of a student’s 200–800 score. The essay score itself was simply the sum (2–12) of two readers’ 1–6 scores. Readers were expected to grade holistically and not to focus on individual components of the writing. The SAT essay came under a great deal of criticism for being too loosely structured. Factual accuracy was not required; it was not that difficult to make pre-fabricated material fit the prompt; many colleges found the 2–12 essay scores of little use; and the conflation of the essay and “Writing” was, in some cases, blocking the use of the SAT Writing score—which included grammar and usage—entirely.

With the 2016 overhaul of the SAT came an attempt to make the essay more academically defensible while also making it optional (as the ACT essay had long been). The essay score is not a part of the 400–1600 score. Instead, a student opting to take the SAT Essay receives 2–8 scores in three dimensions: reading, analysis, and writing. No equating or fancy lookup table is involved. The scores are simply the sum of two readers’ 1–4 ratings in each dimension. There is no official totaling or averaging of scores, although colleges may choose to do so.

Readers avoid extremes

What is almost universally true about grading of standardized test essays is that readers gravitate to the middle of the scale. The default instinct is to nudge a score above or below a perceived cutoff or midpoint rather than to evenly distribute scores. When the only options are 1, 2, 3, or 4, the consequence is predictable—readers give out a lot of 2s and 3s and very few 1s and 4s. In fact, our analysis shows that 80% of all reader scores are 2s or 3s. This, in turn, means that most of the dimension scores (the sum of the two readers) range from 4 to 6. Analysis scores are outliers. A third of readers give essays a 1 in Analysis. Below is the distribution of reader scores across all dimensions.

What is a good SAT Essay score?

By combining multiple data sources—including extensive College Board scoring information—Compass has estimated the mean and mode (most common) essay scores for students at various score levels. We also found that the reading and writing dimensions were similar, while analysis scores lagged by a point across all sub-groups. These figures should not be viewed as cutoffs for “good” scores. The loose correlation of essay score to Total Score and the high standard deviation of essay scores means that students at all levels see wide variation of scores. The average essay-taking student scores a 1,080 on the SAT and receives just under a 5/4/5.

College Board recently released essay results for the class of 2017, so score distributions are now available. From these, percentiles can also be calculated. We provide these figures with mixed feelings. On the one hand, percentile scores on such an imperfect measure can be highly misleading. On the other hand, we feel that students should understand the full workings of essay scores.

The role of luck

What is frustrating to many students on the SAT and ACT is that they can score 98th percentile in most areas and then get a “middling” score on the essay. This result is actually quite predictable. Whereas math and verbal scores are the result of dozens of objective questions, the essay is a single question graded subjectively. To replace statistical concepts with a colloquial one—far more “luck” is involved than on the multiple-choice sections. What text is used in the essay stimulus? How well will the student respond to the style and subject matter? Which of the hundreds of readers were assigned to grade the student’s essay? What other essays has the reader recently scored?

Even good writers run into the unpredictability involved and the fact that essay readers give so few high scores. A 5 means that the Readers A and B gave the essay a 2 and a 3, respectively. Which reader was “right?” If the essay had encountered two readers like Reader A, it would have received a 4. If the essay had been given two readers like Reader B, it would have received a 6. That swing makes a large difference if we judge scores exclusively by percentiles, but essay scores are simply too blurry to make such cut-and-dry distinctions. More than 80% of students receive one of three scores—4, 5, or 6 on the reading and writing dimensions and 3, 4, or 5 on analysis.

What do colleges expect?

It’s unlikely that many colleges will release a breakdown of essay scores for admitted students—especially since so few are requiring it. What we know from experience with the ACT , though, is that even at the most competitive schools in the country, the 25th–75th percentile scores of admitted students were 8–10 on the ACT’s old 2–12 score range. We expect that things will play out similarly for the SAT and that most students admitted to highly selective colleges will have domain scores in the 5–7 range (possibly closer to 4–6 for analysis). It’s even less likely for students to average a high score across all three areas than it is to obtain a single high mark. We estimate that only a fraction of a percent of students will average an 8—for example [8/8/8, 7/8/8, 8/7/8, or 8,8,7].

Update as of October 2017. The University of California system has published the 25th–75th percentile ranges for enrolled students. It has chosen to work with total scores. The highest ranges—including those at UCLA and Berkeley—are 17–20. Those scores are inline with our estimates above.

How will colleges use the domain scores?

Colleges have been given no guidance by College Board on how to use essay scores for admission. Will they sum the scores? Will they average them? Will they value certain areas over others? Chances are that if you are worrying too much about those questions, then you are likely losing sight of the bigger picture. We know of no cases where admission committees will make formulaic use of essay scores. The scores are a very small, very error-prone part of a student’s testing portfolio.

How low is too low?

Are 3s and 4s, then, low enough that an otherwise high-scoring student should retest? There is no one-size-fits-all answer to that question. In general, it is a mistake to retest solely to improve an essay score unless a student is confident that the SAT Total Score can be maintained or improved. A student with a 1340 PSAT and 1280 SAT may feel that it is worthwhile to bring up low essay scores because she has previously shown that she can do better on the Evidence-based Reading and Writing and Math, as well. A student with a 1400 PSAT and 1540 SAT should think long and hard before committing to a retest. Admission results from the class of 2017 may give us some added insight into the use of SAT Essay scores.

Will colleges continue to require the SAT Essay?

For the class of 2017, Compass has prepared a list of the SAT Essay and ACT Writing policies for 360 of the top colleges . Several of the largest and most prestigious public university systems—California, Michigan, and Texas, for example, still require the essay, and a number of highly competitive private colleges do the same—for example, Dartmouth, Harvard, Princeton, and Stanford.

The number of excellent colleges not requiring the SAT Essay, though, is long and getting longer. Compass expects even more colleges to drop the essay requirement for the classes of 2018 and 2019. Policies are typically finalized in late spring or during the summer.

Should I skip the essay entirely?

A common question regarding SAT scores is whether the whole mess can be avoided by skipping the essay. After all, if only about 10% of colleges are requiring the section, is it really that important? Despite serious misgivings about the test and the ways scores are interpreted, Compass still recommends that most students take the essay unless they are certain that they will not be applying to any of the colleges requiring or recommending it. Nationally, about 70% of students choose to take the essay on at least one SAT administration. When looking at higher scoring segments, that quickly rises to 85–90%. Almost all Compass students take the SAT Essay at least once to insure that they do not miss out on educational opportunities.

Should I prepare for the SAT Essay?

Most Compass students decide to do some preparation for the essay, because taking any part of a test “cold” can be an unpleasant experience, and students want to avoid feeling like a retake is necessary. In addition to practicing exercises and tests, most students can perform well enough on the SAT Essay after 1–2 hours of tutoring. Students taking a Compass practice SAT will also receive a scored essay. Students interested in essay writing tips for the SAT can refer to Compass blog posts on the difference between the ACT and SAT tasks  and the use of first person on the essays .

Will I be able to see my essay?

Yes. ACT makes it difficult to obtain a copy of your Writing essay, but College Board includes it as part of your online report.

Will colleges have access to my essay? Even if they don’t require it?

Yes, colleges are provided with student essays. We know of very few circumstances where SAT Essay reading is regularly conducted. Colleges that do not require the SAT Essay fall into the “consider” and “do not consider” camps. Schools do not always list this policy on their website or in their application materials, so it is hard to have a comprehensive list. We recommend contacting colleges for more information. In general, the essay will have little to no impact at colleges that do not require or recommend it.

Is the SAT Essay a reason to take the ACT instead?

Almost all colleges that require the SAT Essay require Writing for ACT-takers. The essays are very different on the two tests, but neither can be said to be universally “easier” or “harder.” Compass recommends that the primary sections of the tests determine your planning. Compass’ content experts have also written a piece on how to attack the ACT essay .

Key links in this post:

ACT and SAT essay requirements ACT Writing scores explained Comparing ACT and SAT essay tasks The use of first person in ACT and SAT essays Understanding the “audience and purpose” of the ACT essay Compass proctored practice testing for the ACT, SAT, and Subject Tests

About Art Sawyer

Art graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University, where he was the top-ranked liberal arts student in his class. Art pioneered the one-on-one approach to test prep in California in 1989 and co-founded Compass Education Group in 2004 in order to bring the best ideas and tutors into students' homes and computers. Although he has attained perfect scores on all flavors of the SAT and ACT, he is routinely beaten in backgammon.

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Hi! I’m a high school junior who took the October and November SATs. I got a 1500 on October and then retook it to get a 1590 in November. I’m very happy with my score, but my essays are troubling me. I got a 6-4-6 in October and thought I would improve in November, but I got a 6-3-6. I really cannot improve my actual SAT score, but I don’t understand the essay. I’ve always been a good writer and have consistently been praised for it in English class and outside of class. Is this essay score indicative of my writing skill? And will this essay hurt my chances at Ivy League and other top tier schools? None of the schools I plan on applying to require it, but, since I have to submit it, will it hurt my chances? Thank you so much.

Maya, The essay is becoming increasingly irrelevant. Honestly, a 6-4-6 is a fine score and will not hurt your chances for admission. It’s something of an odd writing task, so I wouldn’t worry that it doesn’t match your writing skills elsewhere.

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Some top schools are bringing back ACT and SAT requirements — but most colleges are still test-optional. Here's what you need to know.

• Some colleges that were test-optional during the pandemic are requiring SAT or ACT scores again.
• Those schools have said that having scores will help them recruit a more diverse student body.
• Still, the majority of colleges in the country are remaining test-optional.

Some colleges are bringing standardized testing requirements back to their admissions processes after nixing them during the pandemic.

But they're still not in the majority.

Since the start of 2024, some prestigious schools announced they will once again require SAT or ACT scores in prospective students' applications. Dartmouth, for example, announced in February that while it took on the "test-optional" policy in response to the pandemic, it will be reinstating the testing requirement for the class of 2029.

"Our bottom line is simple: we believe a standardized testing requirement will improve—not detract from—our ability to bring the most promising and diverse students to our campus," the university said in a statement.

Yale and Brown made similar announcements, saying they conducted studies that found requiring testing allowed them to attract the most diverse student body.

"Our analysis made clear that SAT and ACT scores are among the key indicators that help predict a student's ability to succeed and thrive in Brown's demanding academic environment," Brown's Provost Francis Doyle said in a statement.

However, these elite schools are still outnumbered by the colleges that decided standardized testing stood in the way of otherwise-qualified applicants. According to the National Center for Fair and Open Testing, more than 80% of colleges will be test-optional for fall 2025 admissions.

"Test-optional policies continue to dominate at national universities, state flagships, and selective liberal arts colleges because they typically result in more applicants, academically stronger applicants and more diversity," FairTest Executive Director Harry Feder said in a statement.

The pros and cons surrounding standardized testing have been long-debated . While some argue the tests can put lower-income students at a disadvantage because they might not have access to the same tutoring resources that wealthier students have, others argue the tests give students from all backgrounds a way to show their skills — and give schools an easy way to choose who they should admit.

Dominique Baker, an associate professor at the University of Delaware who researches education policy — primarily financial aid and admissions policies — told Business Insider that the schools that are reinstating testing requirements right now didn't choose to go test-optional because they thought it was "a good policy decision." The pandemic forced them to do so because students couldn't get to testing sites, and that's no longer an issue.

"The institutions we're currently talking about, they're requiring tests again and didn't necessarily want to ever stop requiring tests," Baker said. "That matters."

Related stories

Here's what students should know about the schools changing their policies this year — and what it could mean for them.

The return of some testing requirements

While many of the Ivy League schools that are reinstating testing requirements cited their aim to help broaden diversity on campus, some other schools have put forth slightly different reasons for their shift in policies.

The University of Texas-Austin, for example, announced its reinstatement of testing requirements in March after shifting to test-optional during the pandemic. Its reason: requiring testing scores would help the school choose between many high school seniors with high GPAs.

"Our experience during the test-optional period reinforced that standardized testing is a valuable tool for deciding who is admitted and making sure those students are placed in majors that are the best fit," the university's president Jay Hartzell said in a statement. "Also, with an abundance of high school GPAs surrounding 4.0, especially among our auto-admits, an SAT or ACT score is a proven differentiator that is in each student's and the University's best interest."

However, other schools that adopted test-optional during the pandemic have chosen to maintain the practice. The University of Michigan, for example, announced in February that it would be formally adopting a test-optional admissions policy. It said that since the fall of 2020, the school saw "a significant increase in applications from students from all backgrounds," suggesting that a test-optional policy opened the door for a more diverse student body.

What it means for schools and students

One reason some schools have wanted to maintain test score requirements, Baker said, is because of their link to financial aid. While some financial aid is need-based — or based on a student or family's income level — a college can choose to award aid based on merit, which it evaluates using a student's GPA or test scores.

"Frequently, the most generous state financial aid that those states offer require test scores. And so what the state could do is they could say, 'We did a really short pause, but now we're going back to requiring test scores for these financial aid pieces,'" Baker said. "And state legislatures could also encourage institutions to go back to requiring tests. So I also think that there is a role that politics plays within this."

On top of that, the wide range of testing policies can be confusing for students. For many schools, the two test-optional and testing-required categories are just umbrellas — there can be different policies within each college, like requiring tests for an honors program but not for regular admission.

Even so, data has shown students have continued to take tests despite applying to schools with test-optional policies. According to the College Board, 1.9 million students in the high school class of 2023 took the SAT at least once, an increase from 1.7 million in 2022.

Moving forward, Baker said it's important that if more schools choose to switch their testing policies, they consider the announcement's timing.

"The more times you take the test, the better your score is. So if an institution announces in February or March that they're going to be requiring tests for the fall, then students really do not have a ton of time to take them," Baker said. "And so I do think that the timing of the announcement and the timing of when the policy takes effect really, really matter."

Watch: Why student loans aren't canceled, and what Biden's going to do about it

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The SAT is coming back at some colleges. It’s stressing everyone out.

A patchwork of admissions test policies is wreaking havoc on students, parents and college admissions consultants.

A California mother drove 80 miles this month to find an SAT testing center with an open seat where her high school junior could take the exam. During college tours this spring, a teen recalled hearing some would-be applicants groan when admissions staffers announced they could not guarantee test-optional policies would continue.

And across the country, college counselors are fielding questions from teenagers alarmed, encouraged or simply confused by what seems like the return of the standardized test in admissions — maybe? Sort of? In some places, but not in others?

“You could be expecting and preparing for a certain way to apply to a college and present yourself — but then they change it mid-application process,” said Kai Talbert, a 17-year-old high school junior in Pennsylvania. “That’s really confusing. It can set back a lot of people.”

Colleges nationwide have been updating their coronavirus-era policies on standardized testing, which many dropped when the pandemic shut down in-person testing centers. Some of the most selective schools are declaring they will require tests again — including, across the last two months, Dartmouth College and Yale and Brown universities. Others, such as the University of Chicago and Columbia University, won’t. And still others have not yet picked a permanent policy: Princeton, Stanford, Cornell and the University of Pennsylvania have said they will remain test-optional for another year or two, and Harvard University plans to keep its test-optional policy at least through the 2025-26 application cycle.

Public universities have veered in different directions, too: The University of Tennessee system requires tests. The University of Michigan will be test-optional. The University of California system is test-blind, meaning schools refuse to consider SAT or ACT scores for admissions.

The patchwork of policies is wreaking havoc on applicants, parents and college admissions consultants nationwide, who are being forced to recalculate where and how they are willing to apply — or what to tell anxious teenagers about whether to test, retest or skip testing entirely — as decisions keep rolling out in real time.

Laurie Kopp Weingarten, founder of One-Stop College Counseling in New Jersey, said she has a new response whenever a student gives her a list of their school targets. She starts by going down the list, school by school, to review each institution’s testing rules and whether those seem likely to change.

Taking a breath, Weingarten rattled off a summary of the different testing requirements in place at every Ivy League school. It took her three minutes.

“Even just saying it, it sounds like insanity to me, and then we’re expecting kids to understand this?” Weingarten said. “Colleges should really analyze the data, come up with a decision and stop changing their mind.”

The shifting testing expectations are among many changes roiling college admissions this year. Colleges are still grappling with the fallout from the landmark Supreme Court ruling that ended the use of race-based affirmative action in admissions. Many are undertaking an array of experiments in response to the decision in a bid to maintain diverse admitted classes — ending legacy preferences in some cases, adding essay prompts on adversity or identity in others, or increasing outreach in low-income areas.

And the disastrous rollout of a federal financial aid form that was supposed to simplify the notoriously difficult process has left students, parents and schools scrambling .

This is the most hectic and distressing admissions cycle in recent memory, said Jennifer Nuechterlein, a college and career counselor at a New Jersey high school. She laid special blame on schools that reinstated testing mandates in the past two months, some of which affect the high school juniors who will begin applying in the fall. This class of teens will have to take the SAT or ACT, should they decide to do so, within the next six months.

“Students can’t just test overnight,” Nuechterlein said. “There are students who want to prep, there are students who are not math- or English-ready. ... Students are going to be unprepared.”

For the most ambitious, high-achieving students, the tests are another stressful hurdle to clear as they apply to the most selective colleges. And for many other students, the test scores — even if not required for admission — are mandatory if they want to qualify for some financial aid programs or, on some campuses, certain degree programs.

Critics of standardized tests have argued that they mirror, or exacerbate, societal inequities, in part because students from unstable homes or with limited resources cannot afford SAT or ACT tutors or testing preparation classes, or may not know of free resources such as Khan Academy . Even before the pandemic, some schools had moved to make the scores optional to avoid creating another barrier for students.

Then the pandemic hit, spurring a crisis response when students literally could not access spaces in which to take standardized tests, said Dominique J. Baker, a University of Delaware associate professor of education and public policy who studies admissions policies.

“There were a number of institutions that never would have chosen to have gone test-optional except the pandemic made them,” she said. “Those institutions, by and large, are going back to requiring test scores.”

MIT, Georgetown University and the University of Florida are among schools that quickly chose to reinstate the requirements, with MIT announcing the change in 2022. Many others have spent the years since the virus arrived studying what effect going test-optional had on their admitted classes.

At Brown, Yale and Dartmouth, officials said they had found something surprising: Considering test scores would help them identify more promising applicants from disadvantaged backgrounds, not fewer. After looking at their own data, leaders at the three Ivy League schools say they concluded that SAT and ACT scores are highly predictive of students’ academic performance in college, more so than high school grades. They also found that some less-advantaged students withheld their scores when sharing them would have boosted their chances.

Depriving admissions officers of SAT and ACT scores meant they were less able to evaluate an applicant’s chances of thriving at Brown, Provost Francis J. Doyle III said in an interview this month .

“Our analysis suggested our admissions could be more effective if we brought back testing as an instrument,” Doyle said.

The University of Texas at Austin is also choosing to require testing again, the school announced earlier this month. Jay Hartzell, the school’s president, said he and others worried the cost and preparation associated with the tests could keep students from applying. But about 90 percent of UT Austin applicants in the latest round took the SAT even though it was optional, Hartzell said. And the school found that students who declined to submit scores were less successful once enrolled.

John Friedman, a professor of economics and international and public affairs at Brown, said he wouldn’t be surprised if more of those highly selective schools reinstate a testing requirement. He was one of the authors of the study from Opportunity Insights, a nonprofit at Harvard University, on standardized test scores and student performance at a dozen “Ivy-plus” universities.

“It’s not just about the test scores being a good predictor,” he said. “We show in the paper that students who attend a school, having been admitted without a test score, perform at the bottom of the distribution.” He said schools should look at their own data to determine their policy.

Nonetheless, most schools nationwide will probably remain test-optional, predicted Angel Pérez, the chief executive of the National Association for College Admission Counseling. For many institutions, he said, the policy has been a huge success, bumping up the number of applicants and diversifying admitted classes.

He added that most American high-schoolers are applying to schools that admit nearly all applicants, to public schools or to colleges close to home, he said: “So the majority of students aren’t going to be impacted.”

Morehouse College is among those maintaining a test-optional policy, which the historically Black college adopted in 2020. Since going test-optional, Morehouse has seen an increased number of applicants and an increased acceptance rate from admitted students, said Michael Gumm, Morehouse’s director of admissions and recruitment.

The majority of Morehouse applicants choose not to submit scores, Gumm said, and more students are completing their applications than in the past. He said Morehouse is looking for leaders, so essays and letters of recommendation carry a lot of weight.

Gumm said he often preaches to students: “Your test scores do not make you who you are.”

But for some students, the tests remain a priority. Alina Bunch, a 16-year-old high school junior in Texas, said that even when she saw schools dropping test requirements, she never altered her plan to take the ACT. The exam, she says, is a way to demonstrate determination and academic rigor.

She thinks it’s generally a good thing that schools are bringing back testing requirements, because they can function as a mechanism of standardization in a sometimes subjective admissions process. She does fear the effects of reinstating test requirements for students who cannot afford tutoring.

But for herself — after taking a summer course to prepare for the ACT and scoring high on the exam — she has no real worries. “It was never a question for me, of whether I should do it or not,” Alina said.

Many students pursued similar strategies, continuing to take standardized tests throughout the test-optional trend. After a dramatic drop in 2020 spurred by the sudden closure of test sites, the number of students taking the SAT nationally has risen every year since, per the College Board, and reached 1.9 million for the class of 2023. That’s about 300,000 short of the last pre-pandemic total, when 2.2 million members of the class of 2019 sat for the exam — the largest-ever group to do so.

Joan Koven, who heads college consulting company Academic Access in Pennsylvania, said she never expected standardized testing to suffer a real drop in popularity.

“The ACTs and the SATs are Burger King and McDonald’s,” she said. “They’re not going away.”

But in some places, counselors wish they would. Priscilla Grijalva, a high school counselor in California’s San Jacinto Unified School District, said the elimination of test requirements in the UC system and California State University campuses was a godsend for the nearly 300 students she works with every year, a mix of White, Black and Latino teens, most of whom are socioeconomically disadvantaged.

In the past, many of her students applied only to community colleges. But now she has seen a sharp rise in those willing to aim for state universities.

“It has changed our students’ mindsets,” Grijalva said. “Now it’s like, ‘Hey, I can do this.’ They’re more confident in their leadership and their grades.”

But the flurry of recent announcements from schools altering their testing rules has proved alarming, she said. Her students “do feel the pressure coming back,” she said. “They’re starting to talk.”

Claire Elkin, 16, overheard some of this nervous chatter when she was touring colleges this spring with her family — making visits to places including the University of Virginia, Vanderbilt University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. At every school, recalled Claire, who took the ACT and intends to submit her scores, admissions tour leaders said something like: “Yeah, we’re test-optional now, but we can’t guarantee anything for you.”

Every time, the crowds of hopefuls around Claire broke into murmurs that ranged from anguished to angry, she said. She remembered one family whose daughters seemed especially upset, spurring the mother to jump into emergency action trying to calm the girls as the admissions presentation continued.

“A lot of kids my age can’t set a path right now for what they should be prioritizing when they’re applying for schools,” Claire said. “So there is definitely more panic.”

An earlier version of this article included incorrect information about the rise in the number of students who have taken the SAT since a drop sparked by the pandemic. The number of students taking the test reached 1.9 million for the class of 2023, about 300,000 fewer than for the class of 2019. The article has been corrected.

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Sat / act prep online guides and tips, how does sat essay length affect your score.

SAT Writing

True or False : Since essay length is not mentioned in the SAT essay grading rubric , it doesn’t matter how much you write in your essay.

Answer : True...but also false. Read on for an explanation of why and how the length of your SAT essay can affect your score.

feature image credit: How long by Martin Abegglen , used under CC BY-SA 2.0 /Cropped & modified from original.

UPDATE: SAT Essay No Longer Offered

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In January 2021, the College Board announced that after June 2021, it would no longer offer the Essay portion of the SAT (except at schools who opt in during School Day Testing). It is now no longer possible to take the SAT Essay, unless your school is one of the small number who choose to offer it during SAT School Day Testing.

While most colleges had already made SAT Essay scores optional, this move by the College Board means no colleges now require the SAT Essay. It will also likely lead to additional college application changes such not looking at essay scores at all for the SAT or ACT, as well as potentially requiring additional writing samples for placement.

What does the end of the SAT Essay mean for your college applications? Check out our article on the College Board's SAT Essay decision for everything you need to know.

Why Does Essay Length Matter?

Why would you think that essay length even matters in the first place? As I said in the introduction, it's not as if the SAT essay rubric mentions essay length at all.

Well, there's at least one good reason to think this: essay length is positively correlated with essay score .

Ever since the essay was added to the SAT, current MIT research affiliate (and former director of the MIT undergraduate writing program) Les Perelman has been vocal about how the longer an essay is, the more likely it is to get a higher score. According to this 2005 New York Times article by Michael Winerip, Perelman analyzed the lengths and scores of 54 SAT-approved sample essays and found a nearly 90% correlation. The shortest essays (around 100 words) received the lowest possible score, 1 (or a combined score of 2 out of 12), while the longest essays (around 400 words), received the highest score, a 6 (or a combined score of 12 out of 12) . Based on these findings, representatives of the CollegeBoard stated that they would be releasing shorter examples of higher-scoring essays.

This controversy first erupted in early 2005, right after the new SAT essay was introduced. To see if there had been any changes since then, I did my own analysis of the essays in the CollegeBoard's essay scoring guide that were all written in response to the sample prompt. Take a look at what I found:

Bonus graph reading practice for you in this, an article on essays. You're welcome.

As you can see, as essay length (measured by word count in the graph above) increases, the score also increases .

Just because longer essays tend to score better, however, doesn’t mean that you should just write the word “ideology” over and over again to fill up the page. The reason longer essays tend to score better is that students who write longer essays provide more support for their theses.

If this is the essay prompt:

"Is it important to question the ideas and decisions of people in positions of authority,"

and all you write is the following:

"It's important to question authority because sometimes authority stops you from doing things you want. Like getting a pony. I want a pony. I want a pony. I want a pony. I want a pony."

for two pages, you'll still get a 0. Maybe a 1, if the grader is feeling generous and thinks that you made some attempt to write about the issue discussed in a prompt. For more on the thought process of essay grading, read our article about insights from real SAT essay graders .

Similarly, if you try to drag out one example by writing larger than usual and restating the same facts and information over and over again, it won't automatically get you a higher score. In fact, you may lose points if either of your essay's graders think that your repeating of information leads to lack of coherence in your writing.

In any case, unless you have extremely small handwriting, it’s very difficult to write an essay that presents a thesis and supports it with at least two specific examples in less than one page.

So How Long Should Your Essay Be?

Many factors go into determining essay length, which makes it difficult to give a blanket length recommendation. Here are the most important factors when it comes to length of your SAT essay:

• Vocabulary. Often, the more advanced vocab you use, the fewer words you’ll need to get the job done, which might result in a shorter essay.
• Handwriting size. Students with larger handwriting will naturally take up more space on the page than students with smaller handwriting. This doesn't necessarily mean students with larger handwriting have an advantage, however; in fact, students with larger handwriting tend to run into the issue of having filled two pages and not finished saying everything they needed or wanted to say.
• How fast you can write and think. If you need to take longer to plan out your essay, you might end up writing a shorter essay, simply because you don't have as much time to write. That doesn't necessarily mean that you'll do worse on the essay - since an organized essay with strong specific examples will score better than a disorganized one without specific examples - but it does mean that you might end up with less time to write out your ideas.
• How much time you leave yourself to write (vs. how much time you take to plan). This is something you need to figure out for yourself through practice and observation. Over the years, I've realized that I can write fairly quickly, which means that it's okay if I take a little more time to plan out my essay - I'll still be able to fill up those two pages. On the other hand, if you find that you're a slow writer, you might not be able to write enough unless you get very fast at planning your essay.

In general, assuming about 150 words per handwritten page, you need to write at least a page and a half (1.5 pages) to get a 3 or above on your essay (or a combined score of 6 or above). You'll need at least that much space to say what you need to say and support it clearly with concrete examples.

What’s Next?

Want to find out more about how to write a good SAT essay? Watch us write a top-scoring essay step-by-step , then check out our tips on how to write a long SAT essay as well as our more general SAT essay tips .

Discover the secrets to getting a perfect 12 on your SAT essay here .

What if you're planning on taking the new SAT? Read our breakdown of the new SAT essay here .

Want to get serious about improving your SAT score? We have the leading online SAT prep program that will raise your score by 160+ points, guaranteed .

Exclusive to our program, we have an expert SAT instructor grade each of your SAT essays and give you customized feedback on how to improve your score.

Check out our 5-day free trial and sign up for free:

Laura graduated magna cum laude from Wellesley College with a BA in Music and Psychology, and earned a Master's degree in Composition from the Longy School of Music of Bard College. She scored 99 percentile scores on the SAT and GRE and loves advising students on how to excel in high school.

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Crying Myself to Sleep on the Biggest Cruise Ship Ever

Seven agonizing nights aboard the Icon of the Seas

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MY FIRST GLIMPSE of Royal Caribbean’s Icon of the Seas, from the window of an approaching Miami cab, brings on a feeling of vertigo, nausea, amazement, and distress. I shut my eyes in defense, as my brain tells my optical nerve to try again.

The ship makes no sense, vertically or horizontally. It makes no sense on sea, or on land, or in outer space. It looks like a hodgepodge of domes and minarets, tubes and canopies, like Istanbul had it been designed by idiots. Vibrant, oversignifying colors are stacked upon other such colors, decks perched over still more decks; the only comfort is a row of lifeboats ringing its perimeter. There is no imposed order, no cogent thought, and, for those who do not harbor a totalitarian sense of gigantomania, no visual mercy. This is the biggest cruise ship ever built, and I have been tasked with witnessing its inaugural voyage.

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“Author embarks on their first cruise-ship voyage” has been a staple of American essay writing for almost three decades, beginning with David Foster Wallace’s “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again,” which was first published in 1996 under the title “Shipping Out.” Since then, many admirable writers have widened and diversified the genre. Usually the essayist commissioned to take to the sea is in their first or second flush of youth and is ready to sharpen their wit against the hull of the offending vessel. I am 51, old and tired, having seen much of the world as a former travel journalist, and mostly what I do in both life and prose is shrug while muttering to my imaginary dachshund, “This too shall pass.” But the Icon of the Seas will not countenance a shrug. The Icon of the Seas is the Linda Loman of cruise ships, exclaiming that attention must be paid. And here I am in late January with my one piece of luggage and useless gray winter jacket and passport, zipping through the Port of Miami en route to the gangway that will separate me from the bulk of North America for more than seven days, ready to pay it in full.

The aforementioned gangway opens up directly onto a thriving mall (I will soon learn it is imperiously called the “Royal Promenade”), presently filled with yapping passengers beneath a ceiling studded with balloons ready to drop. Crew members from every part of the global South, as well as a few Balkans, are shepherding us along while pressing flutes of champagne into our hands. By a humming Starbucks, I drink as many of these as I can and prepare to find my cabin. I show my blue Suite Sky SeaPass Card (more on this later, much more) to a smiling woman from the Philippines, and she tells me to go “aft.” Which is where, now? As someone who has rarely sailed on a vessel grander than the Staten Island Ferry, I am confused. It turns out that the aft is the stern of the ship, or, for those of us who don’t know what a stern or an aft are, its ass. The nose of the ship, responsible for separating the waves before it, is also called a bow, and is marked for passengers as the FWD , or forward. The part of the contemporary sailing vessel where the malls are clustered is called the midship. I trust that you have enjoyed this nautical lesson.

I ascend via elevator to my suite on Deck 11. This is where I encounter my first terrible surprise. My suite windows and balcony do not face the ocean. Instead, they look out onto another shopping mall. This mall is the one that’s called Central Park, perhaps in homage to the Olmsted-designed bit of greenery in the middle of my hometown. Although on land I would be delighted to own a suite with Central Park views, here I am deeply depressed. To sail on a ship and not wake up to a vast blue carpet of ocean? Unthinkable.

Allow me a brief preamble here. The story you are reading was commissioned at a moment when most staterooms on the Icon were sold out. In fact, so enthralled by the prospect of this voyage were hard-core mariners that the ship’s entire inventory of guest rooms (the Icon can accommodate up to 7,600 passengers, but its inaugural journey was reduced to 5,000 or so for a less crowded experience) was almost immediately sold out. Hence, this publication was faced with the shocking prospect of paying nearly $19,000 to procure for this solitary passenger an entire suite—not including drinking expenses—all for the privilege of bringing you this article. But the suite in question doesn’t even have a view of the ocean! I sit down hard on my soft bed. Nineteen thousand dollars for this .

The viewless suite does have its pluses. In addition to all the Malin+Goetz products in my dual bathrooms, I am granted use of a dedicated Suite Deck lounge; access to Coastal Kitchen, a superior restaurant for Suites passengers; complimentary VOOM SM Surf & Stream (“the fastest Internet at Sea”) “for one device per person for the whole cruise duration”; a pair of bathrobes (one of which comes prestained with what looks like a large expectoration by the greenest lizard on Earth); and use of the Grove Suite Sun, an area on Decks 18 and 19 with food and deck chairs reserved exclusively for Suite passengers. I also get reserved seating for a performance of The Wizard of Oz , an ice-skating tribute to the periodic table, and similar provocations. The very color of my Suite Sky SeaPass Card, an oceanic blue as opposed to the cloying royal purple of the standard non-Suite passenger, will soon provoke envy and admiration. But as high as my status may be, there are those on board who have much higher status still, and I will soon learn to bow before them.

In preparation for sailing, I have “priced in,” as they say on Wall Street, the possibility that I may come from a somewhat different monde than many of the other cruisers. Without falling into stereotypes or preconceptions, I prepare myself for a friendly outspokenness on the part of my fellow seafarers that may not comply with modern DEI standards. I believe in meeting people halfway, and so the day before flying down to Miami, I visited what remains of Little Italy to purchase a popular T-shirt that reads DADDY’S LITTLE MEATBALL across the breast in the colors of the Italian flag. My wife recommended that I bring one of my many T-shirts featuring Snoopy and the Peanuts gang, as all Americans love the beagle and his friends. But I naively thought that my meatball T-shirt would be more suitable for conversation-starting. “Oh, and who is your ‘daddy’?” some might ask upon seeing it. “And how long have you been his ‘little meatball’?” And so on.

I put on my meatball T-shirt and head for one of the dining rooms to get a late lunch. In the elevator, I stick out my chest for all to read the funny legend upon it, but soon I realize that despite its burnished tricolor letters, no one takes note. More to the point, no one takes note of me. Despite my attempts at bridge building, the very sight of me (small, ethnic, without a cap bearing the name of a football team) elicits no reaction from other passengers. Most often, they will small-talk over me as if I don’t exist. This brings to mind the travails of David Foster Wallace , who felt so ostracized by his fellow passengers that he retreated to his cabin for much of his voyage. And Wallace was raised primarily in the Midwest and was a much larger, more American-looking meatball than I am. If he couldn’t talk to these people, how will I? What if I leave this ship without making any friends at all, despite my T-shirt? I am a social creature, and the prospect of seven days alone and apart is saddening. Wallace’s stateroom, at least, had a view of the ocean, a kind of cheap eternity.

Worse awaits me in the dining room. This is a large, multichandeliered room where I attended my safety training (I was shown how to put on a flotation vest; it is a very simple procedure). But the maître d’ politely refuses me entry in an English that seems to verge on another language. “I’m sorry, this is only for pendejos ,” he seems to be saying. I push back politely and he repeats himself. Pendejos ? Piranhas? There’s some kind of P-word to which I am not attuned. Meanwhile elderly passengers stream right past, powered by their limbs, walkers, and electric wheelchairs. “It is only pendejo dining today, sir.” “But I have a suite!” I say, already starting to catch on to the ship’s class system. He examines my card again. “But you are not a pendejo ,” he confirms. I am wearing a DADDY’S LITTLE MEATBALL T-shirt, I want to say to him. I am the essence of pendejo .

Eventually, I give up and head to the plebeian buffet on Deck 15, which has an aquatic-styled name I have now forgotten. Before gaining entry to this endless cornucopia of reheated food, one passes a washing station of many sinks and soap dispensers, and perhaps the most intriguing character on the entire ship. He is Mr. Washy Washy—or, according to his name tag, Nielbert of the Philippines—and he is dressed as a taco (on other occasions, I’ll see him dressed as a burger). Mr. Washy Washy performs an eponymous song in spirited, indeed flamboyant English: “Washy, washy, wash your hands, WASHY WASHY!” The dangers of norovirus and COVID on a cruise ship this size (a giant fellow ship was stricken with the former right after my voyage) makes Mr. Washy Washy an essential member of the crew. The problem lies with the food at the end of Washy’s rainbow. The buffet is groaning with what sounds like sophisticated dishes—marinated octopus, boiled egg with anchovy, chorizo, lobster claws—but every animal tastes tragically the same, as if there was only one creature available at the market, a “cruisipus” bred specifically for Royal Caribbean dining. The “vegetables” are no better. I pick up a tomato slice and look right through it. It tastes like cellophane. I sit alone, apart from the couples and parents with gaggles of children, as “We Are Family” echoes across the buffet space.

I may have failed to mention that all this time, the Icon of the Seas has not left port. As the fiery mango of the subtropical setting sun makes Miami’s condo skyline even more apocalyptic, the ship shoves off beneath a perfunctory display of fireworks. After the sun sets, in the far, dark distance, another circus-lit cruise ship ruptures the waves before us. We glance at it with pity, because it is by definition a smaller ship than our own. I am on Deck 15, outside the buffet and overlooking a bunch of pools (the Icon has seven of them), drinking a frilly drink that I got from one of the bars (the Icon has 15 of them), still too shy to speak to anyone, despite Sister Sledge’s assertion that all on the ship are somehow related.

Kim Brooks: On failing the family vacation

The ship’s passage away from Ron DeSantis’s Florida provides no frisson, no sense of developing “sea legs,” as the ship is too large to register the presence of waves unless a mighty wind adds significant chop. It is time for me to register the presence of the 5,000 passengers around me, even if they refuse to register mine. My fellow travelers have prepared for this trip with personally decorated T-shirts celebrating the importance of this voyage. The simplest ones say ICON INAUGURAL ’24 on the back and the family name on the front. Others attest to an over-the-top love of cruise ships: WARNING! MAY START TALKING ABOUT CRUISING . Still others are artisanally designed and celebrate lifetimes spent married while cruising (on ships, of course). A couple possibly in their 90s are wearing shirts whose backs feature a drawing of a cruise liner, two flamingos with ostensibly male and female characteristics, and the legend “ HUSBAND AND WIFE Cruising Partners FOR LIFE WE MAY NOT HAVE IT All Together BUT TOGETHER WE HAVE IT ALL .” (The words not in all caps have been written in cursive.) A real journalist or a more intrepid conversationalist would have gone up to the couple and asked them to explain the longevity of their marriage vis-à-vis their love of cruising. But instead I head to my mall suite, take off my meatball T-shirt, and allow the first tears of the cruise to roll down my cheeks slowly enough that I briefly fall asleep amid the moisture and salt.

I WAKE UP with a hangover. Oh God. Right. I cannot believe all of that happened last night. A name floats into my cobwebbed, nauseated brain: “Ayn Rand.” Jesus Christ.

I breakfast alone at the Coastal Kitchen. The coffee tastes fine and the eggs came out of a bird. The ship rolls slightly this morning; I can feel it in my thighs and my schlong, the parts of me that are most receptive to danger.

I had a dangerous conversation last night. After the sun set and we were at least 50 miles from shore (most modern cruise ships sail at about 23 miles an hour), I lay in bed softly hiccupping, my arms stretched out exactly like Jesus on the cross, the sound of the distant waves missing from my mall-facing suite, replaced by the hum of air-conditioning and children shouting in Spanish through the vents of my two bathrooms. I decided this passivity was unacceptable. As an immigrant, I feel duty-bound to complete the tasks I am paid for, which means reaching out and trying to understand my fellow cruisers. So I put on a normal James Perse T-shirt and headed for one of the bars on the Royal Promenade—the Schooner Bar, it was called, if memory serves correctly.

I sat at the bar for a martini and two Negronis. An old man with thick, hairy forearms drank next to me, very silent and Hemingwaylike, while a dreadlocked piano player tinkled out a series of excellent Elton John covers. To my right, a young white couple—he in floral shorts, she in a light, summery miniskirt with a fearsome diamond ring, neither of them in football regalia—chatted with an elderly couple. Do it , I commanded myself. Open your mouth. Speak! Speak without being spoken to. Initiate. A sentence fragment caught my ear from the young woman, “Cherry Hill.” This is a suburb of Philadelphia in New Jersey, and I had once been there for a reading at a synagogue. “Excuse me,” I said gently to her. “Did you just mention Cherry Hill? It’s a lovely place.”

As it turned out, the couple now lived in Fort Lauderdale (the number of Floridians on the cruise surprised me, given that Southern Florida is itself a kind of cruise ship, albeit one slowly sinking), but soon they were talking with me exclusively—the man potbellied, with a chin like a hard-boiled egg; the woman as svelte as if she were one of the many Ukrainian members of the crew—the elderly couple next to them forgotten. This felt as groundbreaking as the first time I dared to address an American in his native tongue, as a child on a bus in Queens (“On my foot you are standing, Mister”).

“I don’t want to talk politics,” the man said. “But they’re going to eighty-six Biden and put Michelle in.”

I considered the contradictions of his opening conversational gambit, but decided to play along. “People like Michelle,” I said, testing the waters. The husband sneered, but the wife charitably put forward that the former first lady was “more personable” than Joe Biden. “They’re gonna eighty-six Biden,” the husband repeated. “He can’t put a sentence together.”

After I mentioned that I was a writer—though I presented myself as a writer of teleplays instead of novels and articles such as this one—the husband told me his favorite writer was Ayn Rand. “Ayn Rand, she came here with nothing,” the husband said. “I work with a lot of Cubans, so …” I wondered if I should mention what I usually do to ingratiate myself with Republicans or libertarians: the fact that my finances improved after pass-through corporations were taxed differently under Donald Trump. Instead, I ordered another drink and the couple did the same, and I told him that Rand and I were born in the same city, St. Petersburg/Leningrad, and that my family also came here with nothing. Now the bonding and drinking began in earnest, and several more rounds appeared. Until it all fell apart.

Read: Gary Shteyngart on watching Russian television for five days straight

My new friend, whom I will refer to as Ayn, called out to a buddy of his across the bar, and suddenly a young couple, both covered in tattoos, appeared next to us. “He fucking punked me,” Ayn’s frat-boy-like friend called out as he put his arm around Ayn, while his sizable partner sizzled up to Mrs. Rand. Both of them had a look I have never seen on land—their eyes projecting absence and enmity in equal measure. In the ’90s, I drank with Russian soldiers fresh from Chechnya and wandered the streets of wartime Zagreb, but I have never seen such undisguised hostility toward both me and perhaps the universe at large. I was briefly introduced to this psychopathic pair, but neither of them wanted to have anything to do with me, and the tattooed woman would not even reveal her Christian name to me (she pretended to have the same first name as Mrs. Rand). To impress his tattooed friends, Ayn made fun of the fact that as a television writer, I’d worked on the series Succession (which, it would turn out, practically nobody on the ship had watched), instead of the far more palatable, in his eyes, zombie drama of last year. And then my new friends drifted away from me into an angry private conversation—“He punked me!”—as I ordered another drink for myself, scared of the dead-eyed arrivals whose gaze never registered in the dim wattage of the Schooner Bar, whose terrifying voices and hollow laughs grated like unoiled gears against the crooning of “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road.”

But today is a new day for me and my hangover. After breakfast, I explore the ship’s so-called neighborhoods . There’s the AquaDome, where one can find a food hall and an acrobatic sound-and-light aquatic show. Central Park has a premium steak house, a sushi joint, and a used Rolex that can be bought for $8,000 on land here proudly offered at $17,000. There’s the aforementioned Royal Promenade, where I had drunk with the Rands, and where a pair of dueling pianos duel well into the night. There’s Surfside, a kids’ neighborhood full of sugary garbage, which looks out onto the frothy trail that the behemoth leaves behind itself. Thrill Island refers to the collection of tubes that clutter the ass of the ship and offer passengers six waterslides and a surfing simulation. There’s the Hideaway, an adult zone that plays music from a vomit-slathered, Brit-filled Alicante nightclub circa 1996 and proves a big favorite with groups of young Latin American customers. And, most hurtfully, there’s the Suite Neighborhood.

I say hurtfully because as a Suite passenger I should be here, though my particular suite is far from the others. Whereas I am stuck amid the riffraff of Deck 11, this section is on the highborn Decks 16 and 17, and in passing, I peek into the spacious, tall-ceilinged staterooms from the hallway, dazzled by the glint of the waves and sun. For $75,000, one multifloor suite even comes with its own slide between floors, so that a family may enjoy this particular terror in private. There is a quiet splendor to the Suite Neighborhood. I see fewer stickers and signs and drawings than in my own neighborhood—for example, MIKE AND DIANA PROUDLY SERVED U.S. MARINE CORPS RETIRED . No one here needs to announce their branch of service or rank; they are simply Suites, and this is where they belong. Once again, despite my hard work and perseverance, I have been disallowed from the true American elite. Once again, I am “Not our class, dear.” I am reminded of watching The Love Boat on my grandmother’s Zenith, which either was given to her or we found in the trash (I get our many malfunctioning Zeniths confused) and whose tube got so hot, I would put little chunks of government cheese on a thin tissue atop it to give our welfare treat a pleasant, Reagan-era gooeyness. I could not understand English well enough then to catch the nuances of that seafaring program, but I knew that there were differences in the status of the passengers, and that sometimes those differences made them sad. Still, this ship, this plenty—every few steps, there are complimentary nachos or milkshakes or gyros on offer—was the fatty fuel of my childhood dreams. If only I had remained a child.

I walk around the outdoor decks looking for company. There is a middle-aged African American couple who always seem to be asleep in each other’s arms, probably exhausted from the late capitalism they regularly encounter on land. There is far more diversity on this ship than I expected. Many couples are a testament to Loving v. Virginia , and there is a large group of folks whose T-shirts read MELANIN AT SEA / IT’S THE MELANIN FOR ME . I smile when I see them, but then some young kids from the group makes Mr. Washy Washy do a cruel, caricatured “Burger Dance” (today he is in his burger getup), and I think, Well, so much for intersectionality .

At the infinity pool on Deck 17, I spot some elderly women who could be ethnic and from my part of the world, and so I jump in. I am proved correct! Many of them seem to be originally from Queens (“Corona was still great when it was all Italian”), though they are now spread across the tristate area. We bond over the way “Ron-kon-koma” sounds when announced in Penn Station.

“Everyone is here for a different reason,” one of them tells me. She and her ex-husband last sailed together four years ago to prove to themselves that their marriage was truly over. Her 15-year-old son lost his virginity to “an Irish young lady” while their ship was moored in Ravenna, Italy. The gaggle of old-timers competes to tell me their favorite cruising stories and tips. “A guy proposed in Central Park a couple of years ago”—many Royal Caribbean ships apparently have this ridiculous communal area—“and she ran away screaming!” “If you’re diamond-class, you get four drinks for free.” “A different kind of passenger sails out of Bayonne.” (This, perhaps, is racially coded.) “Sometimes, if you tip the bartender $5, your next drink will be free.”

“Everyone’s here for a different reason,” the woman whose marriage ended on a cruise tells me again. “Some people are here for bad reasons—the drinkers and the gamblers. Some people are here for medical reasons.” I have seen more than a few oxygen tanks and at least one woman clearly undergoing very serious chemo. Some T-shirts celebrate good news about a cancer diagnosis. This might be someone’s last cruise or week on Earth. For these women, who have spent months, if not years, at sea, cruising is a ritual as well as a life cycle: first love, last love, marriage, divorce, death.

Read: The last place on Earth any tourist should go

I have talked with these women for so long, tonight I promise myself that after a sad solitary dinner I will not try to seek out company at the bars in the mall or the adult-themed Hideaway. I have enough material to fulfill my duties to this publication. As I approach my orphaned suite, I run into the aggro young people who stole Mr. and Mrs. Rand away from me the night before. The tattooed apparitions pass me without a glance. She is singing something violent about “Stuttering Stanley” (a character in a popular horror movie, as I discover with my complimentary VOOM SM Surf & Stream Internet at Sea) and he’s loudly shouting about “all the money I’ve lost,” presumably at the casino in the bowels of the ship.

So these bent psychos out of a Cormac McCarthy novel are angrily inhabiting my deck. As I mewl myself to sleep, I envision a limited series for HBO or some other streamer, a kind of low-rent White Lotus , where several aggressive couples conspire to throw a shy intellectual interloper overboard. I type the scenario into my phone. As I fall asleep, I think of what the woman who recently divorced her husband and whose son became a man through the good offices of the Irish Republic told me while I was hoisting myself out of the infinity pool. “I’m here because I’m an explorer. I’m here because I’m trying something new.” What if I allowed myself to believe in her fantasy?

“YOU REALLY STARTED AT THE TOP,” they tell me. I’m at the Coastal Kitchen for my eggs and corned-beef hash, and the maître d’ has slotted me in between two couples. Fueled by coffee or perhaps intrigued by my relative youth, they strike up a conversation with me. As always, people are shocked that this is my first cruise. They contrast the Icon favorably with all the preceding liners in the Royal Caribbean fleet, usually commenting on the efficiency of the elevators that hurl us from deck to deck (as in many large corporate buildings, the elevators ask you to choose a floor and then direct you to one of many lifts). The couple to my right, from Palo Alto—he refers to his “porn mustache” and calls his wife “my cougar” because she is two years older—tell me they are “Pandemic Pinnacles.”

This is the day that my eyes will be opened. Pinnacles , it is explained to me over translucent cantaloupe, have sailed with Royal Caribbean for 700 ungodly nights. Pandemic Pinnacles took advantage of the two-for-one accrual rate of Pinnacle points during the pandemic, when sailing on a cruise ship was even more ill-advised, to catapult themselves into Pinnacle status.

Because of the importance of the inaugural voyage of the world’s largest cruise liner, more than 200 Pinnacles are on this ship, a startling number, it seems. Mrs. Palo Alto takes out a golden badge that I have seen affixed over many a breast, which reads CROWN AND ANCHOR SOCIETY along with her name. This is the coveted badge of the Pinnacle. “You should hear all the whining in Guest Services,” her husband tells me. Apparently, the Pinnacles who are not also Suites like us are all trying to use their status to get into Coastal Kitchen, our elite restaurant. Even a Pinnacle needs to be a Suite to access this level of corned-beef hash.

“We’re just baby Pinnacles,” Mrs. Palo Alto tells me, describing a kind of internal class struggle among the Pinnacle elite for ever higher status.

And now I understand what the maître d’ was saying to me on the first day of my cruise. He wasn’t saying “ pendejo .” He was saying “Pinnacle.” The dining room was for Pinnacles only, all those older people rolling in like the tide on their motorized scooters.

And now I understand something else: This whole thing is a cult. And like most cults, it can’t help but mirror the endless American fight for status. Like Keith Raniere’s NXIVM, where different-colored sashes were given out to connote rank among Raniere’s branded acolytes, this is an endless competition among Pinnacles, Suites, Diamond-Plusers, and facing-the-mall, no-balcony purple SeaPass Card peasants, not to mention the many distinctions within each category. The more you cruise, the higher your status. No wonder a section of the Royal Promenade is devoted to getting passengers to book their next cruise during the one they should be enjoying now. No wonder desperate Royal Caribbean offers (“FINAL HOURS”) crowded my email account weeks before I set sail. No wonder the ship’s jewelry store, the Royal Bling, is selling a $100,000 golden chalice that will entitle its owner to drink free on Royal Caribbean cruises for life. (One passenger was already gaming out whether her 28-year-old son was young enough to “just about earn out” on the chalice or if that ship had sailed.) No wonder this ship was sold out months before departure , and we had to pay $19,000 for a horrid suite away from the Suite Neighborhood. No wonder the most mythical hero of Royal Caribbean lore is someone named Super Mario, who has cruised so often, he now has his own working desk on many ships. This whole experience is part cult, part nautical pyramid scheme.

From the June 2014 issue: Ship of wonks

“The toilets are amazing,” the Palo Altos are telling me. “One flush and you’re done.” “They don’t understand how energy-efficient these ships are,” the husband of the other couple is telling me. “They got the LNG”—liquefied natural gas, which is supposed to make the Icon a boon to the environment (a concept widely disputed and sometimes ridiculed by environmentalists).

But I’m thinking along a different line of attack as I spear my last pallid slice of melon. For my streaming limited series, a Pinnacle would have to get killed by either an outright peasant or a Suite without an ocean view. I tell my breakfast companions my idea.

“Oh, for sure a Pinnacle would have to be killed,” Mr. Palo Alto, the Pandemic Pinnacle, says, touching his porn mustache thoughtfully as his wife nods.

“THAT’S RIGHT, IT’S your time, buddy!” Hubert, my fun-loving Panamanian cabin attendant, shouts as I step out of my suite in a robe. “Take it easy, buddy!”

I have come up with a new dressing strategy. Instead of trying to impress with my choice of T-shirts, I have decided to start wearing a robe, as one does at a resort property on land, with a proper spa and hammam. The response among my fellow cruisers has been ecstatic. “Look at you in the robe!” Mr. Rand cries out as we pass each other by the Thrill Island aqua park. “You’re living the cruise life! You know, you really drank me under the table that night.” I laugh as we part ways, but my soul cries out, Please spend more time with me, Mr. and Mrs. Rand; I so need the company .

In my white robe, I am a stately presence, a refugee from a better limited series, a one-man crossover episode. (Only Suites are granted these robes to begin with.) Today, I will try many of the activities these ships have on offer to provide their clientele with a sense of never-ceasing motion. Because I am already at Thrill Island, I decide to climb the staircase to what looks like a mast on an old-fashioned ship (terrified, because I am afraid of heights) to try a ride called “Storm Chasers,” which is part of the “Category 6” water park, named in honor of one of the storms that may someday do away with the Port of Miami entirely. Storm Chasers consists of falling from the “mast” down a long, twisting neon tube filled with water, like being the camera inside your own colonoscopy, as you hold on to the handles of a mat, hoping not to die. The tube then flops you down headfirst into a trough of water, a Royal Caribbean baptism. It both knocks my breath out and makes me sad.

In keeping with the aquatic theme, I attend a show at the AquaDome. To the sound of “Live and Let Die,” a man in a harness gyrates to and fro in the sultry air. I saw something very similar in the back rooms of the famed Berghain club in early-aughts Berlin. Soon another harnessed man is gyrating next to the first. Ja , I think to myself, I know how this ends. Now will come the fisting , natürlich . But the show soon devolves into the usual Marvel-film-grade nonsense, with too much light and sound signifying nichts . If any fisting is happening, it is probably in the Suite Neighborhood, inside a cabin marked with an upside-down pineapple, which I understand means a couple are ready to swing, and I will see none of it.

I go to the ice show, which is a kind of homage—if that’s possible—to the periodic table, done with the style and pomp and masterful precision that would please the likes of Kim Jong Un, if only he could afford Royal Caribbean talent. At one point, the dancers skate to the theme song of Succession . “See that!” I want to say to my fellow Suites—at “cultural” events, we have a special section reserved for us away from the commoners—“ Succession ! It’s even better than the zombie show! Open your minds!”

Finally, I visit a comedy revue in an enormous and too brightly lit version of an “intimate,” per Royal Caribbean literature, “Manhattan comedy club.” Many of the jokes are about the cruising life. “I’ve lived on ships for 20 years,” one of the middle-aged comedians says. “I can only see so many Filipino homosexuals dressed as a taco.” He pauses while the audience laughs. “I am so fired tonight,” he says. He segues into a Trump impression and then Biden falling asleep at the microphone, which gets the most laughs. “Anyone here from Fort Leonard Wood?” another comedian asks. Half the crowd seems to cheer. As I fall asleep that night, I realize another connection I have failed to make, and one that may explain some of the diversity on this vessel—many of its passengers have served in the military.

As a coddled passenger with a suite, I feel like I am starting to understand what it means to have a rank and be constantly reminded of it. There are many espresso makers , I think as I look across the expanse of my officer-grade quarters before closing my eyes, but this one is mine .

A shocking sight greets me beyond the pools of Deck 17 as I saunter over to the Coastal Kitchen for my morning intake of slightly sour Americanos. A tiny city beneath a series of perfectly pressed green mountains. Land! We have docked for a brief respite in Basseterre, the capital of St. Kitts and Nevis. I wolf down my egg scramble to be one of the first passengers off the ship. Once past the gangway, I barely refrain from kissing the ground. I rush into the sights and sounds of this scruffy island city, sampling incredible conch curry and buckets of non-Starbucks coffee. How wonderful it is to be where God intended humans to be: on land. After all, I am neither a fish nor a mall rat. This is my natural environment. Basseterre may not be Havana, but there are signs of human ingenuity and desire everywhere you look. The Black Table Grill Has been Relocated to Soho Village, Market Street, Directly Behind of, Gary’s Fruits and Flower Shop. Signed. THE PORK MAN reads a sign stuck to a wall. Now, that is how you write a sign. A real sign, not the come-ons for overpriced Rolexes that blink across the screens of the Royal Promenade.

“Hey, tie your shoestring!” a pair of laughing ladies shout to me across the street.

“Thank you!” I shout back. Shoestring! “Thank you very much.”

A man in Independence Square Park comes by and asks if I want to play with his monkey. I haven’t heard that pickup line since the Penn Station of the 1980s. But then he pulls a real monkey out of a bag. The monkey is wearing a diaper and looks insane. Wonderful , I think, just wonderful! There is so much life here. I email my editor asking if I can remain on St. Kitts and allow the Icon to sail off into the horizon without me. I have even priced a flight home at less than $300, and I have enough material from the first four days on the cruise to write the entire story. “It would be funny …” my editor replies. “Now get on the boat.”

As I slink back to the ship after my brief jailbreak, the locals stand under umbrellas to gaze at and photograph the boat that towers over their small capital city. The limousines of the prime minister and his lackeys are parked beside the gangway. St. Kitts, I’ve been told, is one of the few islands that would allow a ship of this size to dock.

“We hear about all the waterslides,” a sweet young server in one of the cafés told me. “We wish we could go on the ship, but we have to work.”

“I want to stay on your island,” I replied. “I love it here.”

But she didn’t understand how I could possibly mean that.

“WASHY, WASHY, so you don’t get stinky, stinky!” kids are singing outside the AquaDome, while their adult minders look on in disapproval, perhaps worried that Mr. Washy Washy is grooming them into a life of gayness. I heard a southern couple skip the buffet entirely out of fear of Mr. Washy Washy.

Meanwhile, I have found a new watering hole for myself, the Swim & Tonic, the biggest swim-up bar on any cruise ship in the world. Drinking next to full-size, nearly naked Americans takes away one’s own self-consciousness. The men have curvaceous mom bodies. The women are equally un-shy about their sprawling physiques.

Today I’ve befriended a bald man with many children who tells me that all of the little trinkets that Royal Caribbean has left us in our staterooms and suites are worth a fortune on eBay. “Eighty dollars for the water bottle, 60 for the lanyard,” the man says. “This is a cult.”

“Tell me about it,” I say. There is, however, a clientele for whom this cruise makes perfect sense. For a large middle-class family (he works in “supply chains”), seven days in a lower-tier cabin—which starts at $1,800 a person—allow the parents to drop off their children in Surfside, where I imagine many young Filipina crew members will take care of them, while the parents are free to get drunk at a swim-up bar and maybe even get intimate in their cabin. Cruise ships have become, for a certain kind of hardworking family, a form of subsidized child care.

There is another man I would like to befriend at the Swim & Tonic, a tall, bald fellow who is perpetually inebriated and who wears a necklace studded with little rubber duckies in sunglasses, which, I am told, is a sort of secret handshake for cruise aficionados. Tomorrow, I will spend more time with him, but first the ship docks at St. Thomas, in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Charlotte Amalie, the capital, is more charming in name than in presence, but I still all but jump off the ship to score a juicy oxtail and plantains at the well-known Petite Pump Room, overlooking the harbor. From one of the highest points in the small city, the Icon of the Seas appears bigger than the surrounding hills.

I usually tan very evenly, but something about the discombobulation of life at sea makes me forget the regular application of sunscreen. As I walk down the streets of Charlotte Amalie in my fluorescent Icon of the Seas cap, an old Rastafarian stares me down. “Redneck,” he hisses.

“No,” I want to tell him, as I bring a hand up to my red neck, “that’s not who I am at all. On my island, Mannahatta, as Whitman would have it, I am an interesting person living within an engaging artistic milieu. I do not wish to use the Caribbean as a dumping ground for the cruise-ship industry. I love the work of Derek Walcott. You don’t understand. I am not a redneck. And if I am, they did this to me.” They meaning Royal Caribbean? Its passengers? The Rands?

“They did this to me!”

Back on the Icon, some older matrons are muttering about a run-in with passengers from the Celebrity cruise ship docked next to us, the Celebrity Apex. Although Celebrity Cruises is also owned by Royal Caribbean, I am made to understand that there is a deep fratricidal beef between passengers of the two lines. “We met a woman from the Apex,” one matron says, “and she says it was a small ship and there was nothing to do. Her face was as tight as a 19-year-old’s, she had so much surgery.” With those words, and beneath a cloudy sky, humidity shrouding our weathered faces and red necks, we set sail once again, hopefully in the direction of home.

THERE ARE BARELY 48 HOURS LEFT to the cruise, and the Icon of the Seas’ passengers are salty. They know how to work the elevators. They know the Washy Washy song by heart. They understand that the chicken gyro at “Feta Mediterranean,” in the AquaDome Market, is the least problematic form of chicken on the ship.

The passengers have shed their INAUGURAL CRUISE T-shirts and are now starting to evince political opinions. There are caps pledging to make America great again and T-shirts that celebrate words sometimes attributed to Patrick Henry: “The Constitution is not an instrument for the government to restrain the people; it is an instrument for the people to restrain the government.” With their preponderance of FAMILY FLAG FAITH FRIENDS FIREARMS T-shirts, the tables by the crepe station sometimes resemble the Capitol Rotunda on January 6. The Real Anthony Fauci , by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., appears to be a popular form of literature, especially among young men with very complicated versions of the American flag on their T-shirts. Other opinions blend the personal and the political. “Someone needs to kill Washy guy, right?” a well-dressed man in the elevator tells me, his gray eyes radiating nothing. “Just beat him to death. Am I right?” I overhear the male member of a young couple whisper, “There goes that freak” as I saunter by in my white spa robe, and I decide to retire it for the rest of the cruise.

I visit the Royal Bling to see up close the $100,000 golden chalice that entitles you to free drinks on Royal Caribbean forever. The pleasant Serbian saleslady explains that the chalice is actually gold-plated and covered in white zirconia instead of diamonds, as it would otherwise cost $1 million. “If you already have everything,” she explains, “this is one more thing you can get.”

I believe that anyone who works for Royal Caribbean should be entitled to immediate American citizenship. They already speak English better than most of the passengers and, per the Serbian lady’s sales pitch above, better understand what America is as well. Crew members like my Panamanian cabin attendant seem to work 24 hours a day. A waiter from New Delhi tells me that his contract is six months and three weeks long. After a cruise ends, he says, “in a few hours, we start again for the next cruise.” At the end of the half a year at sea, he is allowed a two-to-three-month stay at home with his family. As of 2019, the median income for crew members was somewhere in the vicinity of $20,000, according to a major business publication. Royal Caribbean would not share the current median salary for its crew members, but I am certain that it amounts to a fraction of the cost of a Royal Bling gold-plated, zirconia-studded chalice.

And because most of the Icon’s hyper-sanitized spaces are just a frittata away from being a Delta lounge, one forgets that there are actual sailors on this ship, charged with the herculean task of docking it in port. “Having driven 100,000-ton aircraft carriers throughout my career,” retired Admiral James G. Stavridis, the former NATO Supreme Allied Commander Europe, writes to me, “I’m not sure I would even know where to begin with trying to control a sea monster like this one nearly three times the size.” (I first met Stavridis while touring Army bases in Germany more than a decade ago.)

Today, I decide to head to the hot tub near Swim & Tonic, where some of the ship’s drunkest reprobates seem to gather (the other tubs are filled with families and couples). The talk here, like everywhere else on the ship, concerns football, a sport about which I know nothing. It is apparent that four teams have recently competed in some kind of finals for the year, and that two of them will now face off in the championship. Often when people on the Icon speak, I will try to repeat the last thing they said with a laugh or a nod of disbelief. “Yes, 20-yard line! Ha!” “Oh my God, of course, scrimmage.”

Soon we are joined in the hot tub by the late-middle-age drunk guy with the duck necklace. He is wearing a bucket hat with the legend HAWKEYES , which, I soon gather, is yet another football team. “All right, who turned me in?” Duck Necklace says as he plops into the tub beside us. “I get a call in the morning,” he says. “It’s security. Can you come down to the dining room by 10 a.m.? You need to stay away from the members of this religious family.” Apparently, the gregarious Duck Necklace had photobombed the wrong people. There are several families who present as evangelical Christians or practicing Muslims on the ship. One man, evidently, was not happy that Duck Necklace had made contact with his relatives. “It’s because of religious stuff; he was offended. I put my arm around 20 people a day.”

Everyone laughs. “They asked me three times if I needed medication,” he says of the security people who apparently interrogated him in full view of others having breakfast.

Another hot-tub denizen suggests that he should have asked for fentanyl. After a few more drinks, Duck Necklace begins to muse about what it would be like to fall off the ship. “I’m 62 and I’m ready to go,” he says. “I just don’t want a shark to eat me. I’m a huge God guy. I’m a Bible guy. There’s some Mayan theory squaring science stuff with religion. There is so much more to life on Earth.” We all nod into our Red Stripes.

“I never get off the ship when we dock,” he says. He tells us he lost $6,000 in the casino the other day. Later, I look him up, and it appears that on land, he’s a financial adviser in a crisp gray suit, probably a pillar of his North Chicago community.

THE OCEAN IS TEEMING with fascinating life, but on the surface it has little to teach us. The waves come and go. The horizon remains ever far away.

I am constantly told by my fellow passengers that “everybody here has a story.” Yes, I want to reply, but everybody everywhere has a story. You, the reader of this essay, have a story, and yet you’re not inclined to jump on a cruise ship and, like Duck Necklace, tell your story to others at great pitch and volume. Maybe what they’re saying is that everybody on this ship wants to have a bigger, more coherent, more interesting story than the one they’ve been given. Maybe that’s why there’s so much signage on the doors around me attesting to marriages spent on the sea. Maybe that’s why the Royal Caribbean newsletter slipped under my door tells me that “this isn’t a vacation day spent—it’s bragging rights earned.” Maybe that’s why I’m so lonely.

Today is a big day for Icon passengers. Today the ship docks at Royal Caribbean’s own Bahamian island, the Perfect Day at CocoCay. (This appears to be the actual name of the island.) A comedian at the nightclub opined on what his perfect day at CocoCay would look like—receiving oral sex while learning that his ex-wife had been killed in a car crash (big laughter). But the reality of the island is far less humorous than that.

One of the ethnic tristate ladies in the infinity pool told me that she loved CocoCay because it had exactly the same things that could be found on the ship itself. This proves to be correct. It is like the Icon, but with sand. The same tired burgers, the same colorful tubes conveying children and water from Point A to B. The same swim-up bar at its Hideaway ($140 for admittance, no children allowed; Royal Caribbean must be printing money off its clientele). “There was almost a fight at The Wizard of Oz ,” I overhear an elderly woman tell her companion on a chaise lounge. Apparently one of the passengers began recording Royal Caribbean’s intellectual property and “three guys came after him.”

I walk down a pathway to the center of the island, where a sign reads DO NOT ENTER: YOU HAVE REACHED THE BOUNDARY OF ADVENTURE . I hear an animal scampering in the bushes. A Royal Caribbean worker in an enormous golf cart soon chases me down and takes me back to the Hideaway, where I run into Mrs. Rand in a bikini. She becomes livid telling me about an altercation she had the other day with a woman over a towel and a deck chair. We Suites have special towel privileges; we do not have to hand over our SeaPass Card to score a towel. But the Rands are not Suites. “People are so entitled here,” Mrs. Rand says. “It’s like the airport with all its classes.” “You see,” I want to say, “this is where your husband’s love of Ayn Rand runs into the cruelties and arbitrary indignities of unbridled capitalism.” Instead we make plans to meet for a final drink in the Schooner Bar tonight (the Rands will stand me up).

Back on the ship, I try to do laps, but the pool (the largest on any cruise ship, naturally) is fully trashed with the detritus of American life: candy wrappers, a slowly dissolving tortilla chip, napkins. I take an extra-long shower in my suite, then walk around the perimeter of the ship on a kind of exercise track, past all the alluring lifeboats in their yellow-and-white livery. Maybe there is a dystopian angle to the HBO series that I will surely end up pitching, one with shades of WALL-E or Snowpiercer . In a collapsed world, a Royal Caribbean–like cruise liner sails from port to port, collecting new shipmates and supplies in exchange for the precious energy it has on board. (The actual Icon features a new technology that converts passengers’ poop into enough energy to power the waterslides . In the series, this shitty technology would be greatly expanded.) A very young woman (18? 19?), smart and lonely, who has only known life on the ship, walks along the same track as I do now, contemplating jumping off into the surf left by its wake. I picture reusing Duck Necklace’s words in the opening shot of the pilot. The girl is walking around the track, her eyes on the horizon; maybe she’s highborn—a Suite—and we hear the voice-over: “I’m 19 and I’m ready to go. I just don’t want a shark to eat me.”

Before the cruise is finished, I talk to Mr. Washy Washy, or Nielbert of the Philippines. He is a sweet, gentle man, and I thank him for the earworm of a song he has given me and for keeping us safe from the dreaded norovirus. “This is very important to me, getting people to wash their hands,” he tells me in his burger getup. He has dreams, as an artist and a performer, but they are limited in scope. One day he wants to dress up as a piece of bacon for the morning shift.

THE MAIDEN VOYAGE OF THE TITANIC (the Icon of the Seas is five times as large as that doomed vessel) at least offered its passengers an exciting ending to their cruise, but when I wake up on the eighth day, all I see are the gray ghosts that populate Miami’s condo skyline. Throughout my voyage, my writer friends wrote in to commiserate with me. Sloane Crosley, who once covered a three-day spa mini-cruise for Vogue , tells me she felt “so very alone … I found it very untethering.” Gideon Lewis-Kraus writes in an Instagram comment: “When Gary is done I think it’s time this genre was taken out back and shot.” And he is right. To badly paraphrase Adorno: After this, no more cruise stories. It is unfair to put a thinking person on a cruise ship. Writers typically have difficult childhoods, and it is cruel to remind them of the inherent loneliness that drove them to writing in the first place. It is also unseemly to write about the kind of people who go on cruises. Our country does not provide the education and upbringing that allow its citizens an interior life. For the creative class to point fingers at the large, breasty gentlemen adrift in tortilla-chip-laden pools of water is to gather a sour harvest of low-hanging fruit.

A day or two before I got off the ship, I decided to make use of my balcony, which I had avoided because I thought the view would only depress me further. What I found shocked me. My suite did not look out on Central Park after all. This entire time, I had been living in the ship’s Disneyland, Surfside, the neighborhood full of screaming toddlers consuming milkshakes and candy. And as I leaned out over my balcony, I beheld a slight vista of the sea and surf that I thought I had been missing. It had been there all along. The sea was frothy and infinite and blue-green beneath the span of a seagull’s wing. And though it had been trod hard by the world’s largest cruise ship, it remained.

This article appears in the May 2024 print edition with the headline “A Meatball at Sea.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

What is Holy Saturday? What the day before Easter means for Christians around the world

Easter Sunday is this upcoming weekend, which means the preceding Saturday is known as Holy Saturday.

According to Britannica, Holy Saturday is a Christian religious observance that ends the Lenten season. The observance "commemorates the final day of Christ's death," according to Britannica, which many Christians traditionally associate with his "triumphant descent into hell or 'to the dead.'" The day comes between Good Friday and Easter Sunday.

Easter is an important holiday for the millions of people around the world who follow the Christian faith as the day celebrates the resurrection of Jesus Christ. The holiday occurs after a 40-day period known as Lent.

Church services, reflection and prayer are some ways that people observe the holiday. Others enjoy a more secular celebration of Easter filled with bunnies, baskets and colorful eggs.

Good Friday: Are banks, post offices, UPS and FedEx open? Here's what to know

When is Holy Saturday? When is Easter?

This year, Holy Saturday is on Saturday, March 30, 2024. Easter Sunday is on Sunday, March 31, 2024.

Why is Easter so early in 2024?

Easter's date changes depending on the year. The holiday is one of several "moveable feasts" in the liturgical year, the History Channel reports. Others include  Ash Wednesday  and  Palm Sunday .

Easter is observed on the first Sunday following the  Paschal full moon , which is the first full moon on or after  the spring equinox . Since Western Christianity uses the Gregorian calendar, Easter typically falls on a Sunday between March 22 and April 25, according to the History Channel.

In Eastern Orthodox Christianity, the date of Easter also varies. The branch follows the Julian calendar, meaning orthodox Easter falls between April 4 and May 8, the History Channel reports. This year, it will take place on Sunday, May 5, 2024. 

Contributing: Olivia Munson, USA TODAY

Gabe Hauari is a national trending news reporter at USA TODAY. You can follow him on X  @GabeHauari  or email him at [email protected].

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‘Leaving home used to be a rite of passage’: Andrew O’Hagan on family, freedom and a generational divide

The Scottish novelist moved out as early as he could. His son says he might never leave. Do young people still want to flee the nest, he asks, and what happens when a population comes to maturity feeling ‘made’ by their parents?

I f you were a working-class teenager in the 1980s, the thing most expected of you in the family home was that you would soon be leaving it. There were imminent romances to be imagined, but few of them burned brighter in the two-bar fire of the soul than the notion that you might soon have keys to your own front door. I think I dreamed about it, the Hoovering whose frequency I could personally control, the music at full volume, the sleep-overs that would never turn into psychodramas involving Bell’s whisky and the police – my own flat , where all the grief could be left behind and tins would be banned from the fridge.

Back in the late 1950s, my parents hadn’t done “single life”. They were “married out of the house”, as they used to say in Glasgow, my mother at 19. “You’ve made your bed, so you can lie in it,” was one of my grandmother’s favourite phrases, as if looking after yourself wasn’t a fledgling activity but a moral imperative carrying a high price for failure. The ability to “stand on your own two feet” (another favourite) went along with the expectation that you wouldn’t let the grass grow under them, a directive to pastures new, one street over perhaps, with a spouse, children and a washing machine of one’s own. “In 1961,” writes the British historian David Kynaston, “only 98,466 houses were built in the public sector, compared to 170,366 for owner-occupiers.” My parents were suddenly in a world where progress meant leaving home and getting a mortgage. As it turned out, they were bred-in-the-bone tenants who shared a heartstopping fear of debt; their kids, on the other hand, each had a flat before they were 30.

The dream of leaving went deep, a kind of poetry for my generation, which spelled out its political demands on T-shirts, always with a melancholy touch. We went on marches. We rocked against racism. But there was something domestic and more quietly political in the songs I loved, from the Beatles’ She’s Leaving Home to the Smiths’ Back to the Old House. It was the bid for a different life and a kind of regretful acceptance that you might have to live that life on your own. Feminism, rock music and the pill appeared to have completely passed my parents by, with their preference for Shirley Bassey, Perry Como, and frequently getting pregnant by accident. (I shouldn’t complain: I was the last.)

There’s no evidence that my mum and dad spent any time in their youth imagining they could live alone. But for me, getting away was an early, passionate theme, and I fantasised about British cities where I might land and discover life. One of my favourite TV programmes was The Liver Birds, about two girls sharing a flat in Liverpool. To me, it was a promise of what the world out there might possibly be at its best: a feast of independence. I watched it with my mother and could see from her reactions that this was something she’d never had – those hairdos, that backchat, those boyfriends, that coat – and I’m sure there was a certain amazement in her voice when she talked about it, as if a person like her never got to leave home. Sons can be brutal in their sense of “can do”, and I was already departing. At school, we spent half an hour every morning writing in our “news books”. It was supposed to be handwriting practice, but I took it as an opportunity to try out some wish-fulfilling autofiction, composing stories from the frontline of our war-torn living room, and reporting on how I would soon be living in a penthouse in Paris.

We were all expected to leave home, but it was a fault in your stars, perhaps, if you travelled too far or forgot the innate superiority of your origins. I went to London, and as the decades passed my mother said it made her sad – “I always thought you’d come back” – yet she also advertised it as one of her achievements, that each of her children had gone off and built their own nest. Pride and proximity have a complicated dance to perform in lives like ours: my father didn’t care about proximity (he only did pride), and once we were in flats of our own he scarcely ever came to visit. For my mother, it was harder. She wanted us to do well, have work, gain a partner, build a home, but she also clearly bracketed it with what felt to her like personal loss. It was a breakup. Unmistakably. I’ll never really know what to say about it, but I find it emerges in my stories – the small dramas of distance that can play out between people who love each other. When I left, aged 21, the bus from Glasgow had scarcely passed Carlisle before my mother emptied my old room and replaced my desk with a doily-festooned dressing table. In her heart (and she lived in her heart) I had betrayed her by wanting to go, and life, for her, was just like that, a series of gains enjoyed by other people at her expense. She could remark that we’d “settled”, and would enjoy saying that to her friends, but I could hear it in her voice that she felt we’d abandoned her in a house of old school photographs.

Leaving home used to be a rite of passage. It’s there in the classics, from Jane Eyre to The Color Purple , with especially vivid depictions of it in postwar British literature – Arthur Seaton battling his way towards a council house in Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning , Jo in Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey , manufacturing by necessity the family she never had, while characters in David Storey’s and Beryl Bainbridge’s novels are always fleeing the coop or flying into Camden or challenging the old domestic habits as they struggle to establish a life of their own. “It had become necessary for me to look for safety elsewhere,” wrote Anita Brookner in Leaving Home . Later in that novel she describes the leave-taking from one’s original family as “the great drama of our lives”. That was true in Brookner’s youth and also in mine, but is it still?

The suggestion now is that young people often can’t afford it, and that very many – weaned on Brexit and versed in the negative isolationism of the pandemic – have trouble imagining themselves as self-elected foreigners or people who would choose to eat alone. The suggestion also is that with house prices as they are, and space limited, the young might be trapped, many of them seeming to find the outside world on their phones while still living with their parents. I’m not sure about that – each generation, especially in Britain, tends to see other generations by its own lights, but I feel there may be something different now in the way we think about space: perhaps it’s less to do with buildings and more to do with rooms. It might be possible to leave home not by actually leaving but by retreating into your own space. According to some artists, TikTok heroes, influencers and hackers, the box bedroom is a stage, an icon of the age – a place where strong feelings are often had at some distance from experience, where bills are paid by other people, where friendships are intense but carried out in a confusion of physical absence, where sex is mostly a rumour or a miasma of breathless scenes online, and where your private choices are commodified by social media. Apart from the financial impossibility, leaving home, for a lot of young people, might feel like leaving the self behind – swapping one’s centre, free wifi, a stocked fridge, the entire production studio of the self, for the anxieties of “freedom” in a totally unaffordable world. Between the British censuses of 2011 and 2021 , the number of adult children living with their parents in England and Wales rose by almost 15%.

Here’s a possible irony. People who are young now may not have had the initial luck their parents had, but commentators say they are going to be much better off in the end, because they will inherit everything. A recent report says they will become the “richest generation in history”. Liam Bailey, who does research for the estate agency Knight Frank, argues that the ramifications of this transfer of wealth will be enormous. I think he means the effect on rental and property markets, but it could also signal a terrifying increase, in the future, of the gulf between those who inherit and those who don’t. (I would vote for a social housing tax on property windfalls beyond a certain value, even after inheritance tax and capital gains, just to close the gap a little and reduce inequality.) Bailey’s report also made me think of other sorts of ramifications, mainly psychic ones, or Freudian ones. What happens when a population that had a less fruitful youth comes to maturity still feeling “made” by their parents? (Hello, Ibsen. Thank you, Philip Larkin .)

Leave-taking is big with writers. We give airtime to the transit of regret, the power of the unsaid. Look at Andrew Haigh’s wonderful new film All of Us Strangers . A writer living on his own in an empty-seeming tower block tries to remember his late parents. He takes a train and goes back to the house where he grew up, and he knocks on the door, which is then opened by his dead mum. And then the writer, played by Andrew Scott, goes into the living room and sits down with his dad and tries to explain the years. That’s what every writer does, every day, as we sit down at the desk and knock again at the door of the old house, hoping to be known this time, recognised for who we actually are. The same music is playing that was playing back then, the same curtains are covering the windows. It doesn’t matter what year it is because we are always borrowing from lost time.

There are lines by Philip Larkin that are truer to me than the ones about your mum and dad fucking you up. Home Is So Sad:

It stays as it was left Shaped to the comfort of the last to go As if to win them back. Instead, bereft Of anyone to please, it withers so, Having no heart to put aside the theft And turn again to what it started as, A joyous shot at how things ought to be, Long fallen wide.

I think I wanted to make a home more than I wanted any other thing in life. I notice only now that my work is full of falling buildings and broken homes, missing children and last hurrahs and carefully furnished rooms. Making a beautiful home, making it yours and making it welcoming and peaceful at last, is one of the hostages to fortune that the child of difficult parents may hold against the future. We left home to reinvent it: that was the plan, but of course life will always bring new disorders and fresh schisms. The task is perhaps to forge both your own home and your own sense of culpability, too.

But the old house is always there, waiting for you. I’ve spent a lot of the last 10 years working on a novel called Caledonian Road, about the fall from grace of an art historian and bon vivant called Campbell Flynn, who thought of himself as a good man. The book is about class, politics and money – but to me it also tells the story of a person who might have left part of himself back in the Glasgow high-rise where he grew up. Perhaps that’s a story of society that we are always seeking to tell in new ways: how we stay progressive as the years pass, and how we might join the hopes of our past to the realities of the turbulent present. Campbell will find out who he really is in the London he fell for, and that fell for him, but perhaps the bid for success and your own story is always to risk estrangement. I’m the father of a 20-year-old, and I suppose I’m both relieved and perplexed when he says he might never leave home. I nod in assent, trying to comprehend, while remembering the person I was in my early 20s, holding in a closed palm the key to my first rented flat.

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The Accidental Tax Cutter in Chief

President biden says he wants to rake in more money from corporations and high earners. but so far, he has cut more taxes than he’s raised..

This transcript was created using speech recognition software. While it has been reviewed by human transcribers, it may contain errors. Please review the episode audio before quoting from this transcript and email [email protected] with any questions.

From “The New York Times,” I’m Michael Barbaro. This is “The Daily.”

[THEME MUSIC]

Today, in his campaign for re-election, President Biden says that raising taxes is at the heart of his agenda. But as it turns out so far, he’s done the opposite as president. My colleague Jim Tankersley explains.

It’s Wednesday, April 3.

Jim, welcome back. We haven’t seen you since the State of the Union. Always a pleasure.

So, so great to be here. And yeah, I finally recovered from staying up all night with you guys.

Yeah, you don’t even know all night. You stopped and we kept going.

That’s true. I did. I got a robust three hours that night. You’re right.

[LAUGHS]:: So Jim, in your capacity as really the chief economic thinker covering this president, you recently came across something very surprising.

Yeah, it started with a pretty basic question for me. I like to do this crazy thing, Michael, where I like to take candidates’ promises and see if they’ve come true.

It’s a little bit wild, but it’s what I do for fun. And in this case, I wanted to look at a very central promise of President Biden’s campaign in 2020, which he has repeated while in office.

I promise you, I guarantee you we can build back, and build back better with an economy that rewards work, not wealth.

The promise was he was going to raise taxes.

But I tell you what I’m going to do, and I make no apologies for it. I’m going to ask the wealthiest Americans and the biggest corporations of the Fortune 500 companies, 91 making a collective billions of dollars, didn’t pay a single solitary penny in federal tax!

Not taxes on the middle class, not taxes on low income workers, but he was going to raise taxes on corporations and the rich.

But I’m going to make sure they pay their fair share!

He was going to make them pay their fair share. And he leaned into it.

Guess what? You’re going to start paying your fair share. I’m going to ask them to finally begin to pay the fair share. It’s not a punishment. Pay your fair share.

He said it over and over.

Fair share? Translation — it’s back to the failed policies of the 1970s.

Republicans loved this. They repeated it too. They told voters that the president was going to raise taxes.

Joe Biden bragging about raising taxes on corporations. That means less money for those very employers to hire people back.

They talked about all the ways in which corporate tax increases could rebound on workers.

Joe Biden will shut down your economy, raise taxes, wants a $4 trillion tax increase. He’s the only politician I’ve ever seen who said, we will raise your taxes. You’re supposed —

It was a very big part of the economic debate for the campaign.

And I wanted to know, is that true? Has that actually played out in the policy agenda the president has had?

So I asked some economists at the Tax Policy Center in Washington to run an analysis and just say, let’s look at all of the ways Biden has changed the tax code in all of those laws he’s signed, and ask, has he raised taxes as president? And it turns out the answer is he has not raised taxes.

On net, he has cut more taxes than he’s raised.

How much more has he cut taxes than raised them?

So by the math that economists use when they look at budgets, the traditional way of scoring tax changes, he has cut taxes by $600 billion on net.

Hmm. A lot of money, a lot of tax cuts.

It’s a lot of tax cuts. The president has been a net tax cutter.

So Jim, why and how did Biden end up cutting taxes, especially if his stated intent was to raise taxes?

Well, there’s two sides of this equation and two complementary explanations for what’s happened here. The first side is the tax increases that Biden ran on, he’s only done a couple of them. He has trillions of dollars of ideas for how to raise taxes on rich people and corporations. The Treasury Department publishes an entire book full of them every year called “The Green Book.”

But in the actual legislation he signed, there’s only been a couple, really. There was a tax on stock buybacks that companies do and then a new minimum tax for certain multinational corporations that have very low tax rates. Those add up to real money, but they are not, in the grand scheme of Biden’s tax increases, a really large amount of the agenda he’s proposed.

So explanation number one, he just hasn’t been that successful in passing tax increases, and there’s a lot of reasons for that. The biggest one is just the simplest one is that he’s just had a really hard time persuading members of Congress, including Democrats, to back some of his favorite tax increases. He wants to raise the corporate income tax rate, which President Trump cut in his 2017 tax bill. Biden wants to raise it to 28 percent from 21 percent. Congress has not had any appetite to go along with that.

He wanted to get rid of what’s called the carried interest loophole, a long-time white whale of Democratic policy making. But he could not get even 50 Democrats to go along with that. Senator Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona was opposed to it, and so it didn’t get included.

And he did some pieces of legislation on a bipartisan basis. And in those cases, Republicans were just not going to pay for anything by raising taxes, and so he had to take those off the table there. So it’s all added up to just not very much activity in Congress to raise taxes on what Biden wants to do.

Got it. So that’s the side of a ledger where Biden simply fails to increase taxes because he can’t get Congress to increase taxes.

Right. But there’s another side, which is also that Biden has signed into law a decent number of tax cuts.

And that starts from the very beginning. Just a couple of months into his presidency, if you’ll recall, we’re still in the depths of the COVID-19 pandemic, the economy is wobbling after it had started to rebound. Biden proposes what is essentially a stimulus bill.

And he includes some tax cuts in there, a tax cut for families, a child tax credit. And it also includes — you remember those direct checks that people got as part of that bill?

Yes, $1,400. I remember them.

Yes, those were technically tax cuts.

So the stimulus bill starts with that. The next year, he passes this bill that is trying to accelerate manufacturing of things like semiconductors in the United States. That’s the CHIPS Act. And that includes some corporate tax cuts for companies that invest in the kind of manufacturing that Biden wants. This is industrial policy via carrots for corporations. And Biden is handing them out as part of this bill.

So tax cuts there. And then finally the Inflation Reduction Act, which includes the largest climate effort in American history is a bunch of corporate tax cuts at its core, tax cuts for manufacturing of solar panels, tax cuts for people to buy electric vehicles, tax cuts for all sorts of things tied to the transition from fossil fuels to lower emission sources of energy. And those tax cuts add up. They add up for corporations. They add up for individuals. And in the end, that full suite of tax cuts that he’s passed across all of this legislation outweighs the modest tax increases that were also included in the Inflation Reduction Act to reduce its cost.

Got it. So a very big reason why Biden ends up cutting taxes, beyond the fact that he’s not able to raise them through Congress, is that that’s what it took, according to those in his administration, to get American industry and American consumers to change their behavior in line with policy goals such as getting more domestic computer chip manufacturing and getting more people to buy electric vehicles they decided the way to do that was to give people tax breaks, which means he cut their taxes.

Right, people and companies. The president certainly has talked throughout the campaign about wanting to give middle class families a break. But he has also, in the process of crafting policy, really come to rely on tax cuts for people and for corporations as a way of achieving these policy goals. And in many cases, again, this is what he had to do to pass these bills through even Democrats in Congress.

Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia didn’t want to just send money to companies that were making solar panels. He wanted there to be tax incentives for it. And so that is part of the reason why these were created as tax incentives. And so all of this adds up to more of a tax cutting record than you might have imagined when Biden was on the campaign trail.

I’m curious who really ended up benefiting from these tax cuts. You said they went to people and to corporations, but on the whole, did they end up reaching lower income Americans, middle income Americans, or the rich?

Well, we don’t have a full distributional analysis, which is what you’re asking for, of the entirety of Biden’s tax changes. But what we can say this — particularly the ones that were in that early stimulus bill, the recovery plan, those were very much targeted toward lower income and middle income Americans.

There were income limits on who could get things like the Child Tax Credit. Obviously, the direct payments went to people who were middle class or less. So the analysis of that would suggest that these were tax cuts for lower income people, for middle class people. And on the flip side, what I think we are likely to see with the electric vehicle credit through the Inflation Reduction Act is that while there are some income limits on who can qualify for that credit, that the people who end up claiming that credit tend to be the higher earners among the people who qualify.

Right. Who buys a Tesla, after all? Somebody with a fair amount of money.

Right, exactly. And of course, the corporate tax cuts go to companies, flow through to their shareholders. There’s a huge debate in the academic literature among politicians about how much of that benefit actually ends up going to their workers versus stays with shareholders. But we can broadly say that Joe Biden has done a lot for certain corporations who are trying to advance his manufacturing goals in particular to reduce their tax bills. And that is certainly not in line with the rhetoric you hear him talking about most of the time about making corporations pay their fair share. And the White House acknowledges this. I asked them about it. And they basically said, we think there’s a difference between just cutting the corporate tax rate in a way that helps anybody no matter what they’re doing and what we’re trying to do, which is basically reward corporations for accelerating the energy transition.

Understood. But where does this ultimately leave Biden’s campaign promise to make the tax code fairer and to make sure that the well-off in particular and corporations are paying their, what he calls, fair share?

Well, I think by Biden’s own measurements, by his own ambitions, he would have to agree that he is nowhere close to what he believes would be a fair share for corporations. Because Biden is still running on this. As he enters his re-election campaign, as it really heats up, a rematch with Donald Trump, the president is really leaning into this message of we need to do more. We need to raise more taxes on corporate America. It is time for these companies and for high earners to pay their fair share.

Right. I didn’t get it done in the first term. But if you elect me, I’ll get it done in the second.

Give me another shot, and this time, I promise, will be different.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

We’ll be right back.

So Jim, let’s talk about Biden’s tax raising plans for a theoretical second term and why anyone should have any faith that he could get it done, if there’s a second term, given the experience so far of his first term.

Yeah, well, man, there’s a lot of plans to talk about. I don’t think we can get through all of them, but we can certainly hit the highlights here. So we can start with the couple of things that Biden has been able to do to raise taxes on corporations. He wants to take those and then plus them up.

He’s put this new minimum tax on corporations. It’s a 15 percent minimum tax on certain multinationals. He now wants to raise that to 21 percent.

He wants to take that corporate stock buyback tax which is 1 percent right now, and he’d like to quadruple it to 4 percent. And then he goes after some things large and small. He wants to do new taxes that hit the use of corporate and private jets. He wants to do new taxes on companies that pay large amounts of compensation to their executives.

And then we get to some really big taxes on high earning individuals. So the president has said over and over again, he won’t raise taxes on anyone making less than $400,000 a year. But he’s got a bunch of taxes for the people above that. So he wants to raise the top marginal income tax rate. He wants to take it from 37 percent, which is the level set by President Trump’s 2017 tax law, and bring it back to 39.6 percent, which is what it was before. He also wants to impose what he calls a billionaires tax.

OK. It’s a 25 percent tax on the total value of all of the assets of anyone worth more than $100 million.

OK, wait. I have several questions about this.

First being a fact check, if it’s a billionaires tax, it’s interesting that it’s going after people who have just 100 million.

Yeah, I think most billionaires would be offended at the inclusion of 100 millionaires in that. Yes, totally agree. That is factually inaccurate, the name.

Right. But beyond that, this sounds very much like a wealth tax, which we don’t really have in our system.

Yeah, it’s a sort of wealth tax. The Biden people don’t call it a wealth tax, but it is a tax on something other than income that you report every year to the IRS as having been earned. It goes beyond just, oh, I got interest from my stock holdings or I made money from my job. It’s, oh, the value of my art collection increased last year, and now Biden’s going to tax me on that increase, even if I didn’t sell the art.

That’s a real change, and that reflects the president’s view that people with enough money to buy enormous art collections that appreciate enormously in value should be paying more in taxes.

Right. And of course, a tax like this is extremely perhaps maddeningly hard to actually pull off. It’s hard to get someone to describe their art collection’s value so that you can apply a 25 tax to it. So this might end up being more of a political statement than a practical tax.

Yeah, there’s also questions about whether it’s constitutional. So there’s all sorts of drama around this proposal, but it is certainly, if nothing else, a statement of the president’s intent to make people worth a lot of money pay a lot more in taxes.

OK, so that’s a lot of proposed tax increases, almost all of them focused on those who are rich and corporations. Overall, Jim, what stands out to you about this Biden term two tax increase plan?

I think we could very fairly say that it’s the largest tax increasing plan by a sitting president or a presidential nominee for a party in American history.

He wants to get a lot of money from corporations and people who earn or are worth a lot of money.

But the rub, of course, is it’s hard to see the Congressional math that lets Biden accomplish these tax increases, some of which, like you said, he couldn’t get done the first time. Why would we think he would get them done the second time even if he wins this fall?

Yeah, it would be really difficult. Biden would have to win in November. Democrats would have to take the House of Representatives back from Republicans, which is certainly possible. It’s very closely divided right now. And they’d need to hold at least 50 seats in the Senate. And then those 50 Democrats in the Senate would have to be willing to go along with far more in tax increases than Democrats were last time around.

So if there is a second term, it feels like we should assume it will be very difficult perhaps even quite unlikely he’s going to get to push through a lot of these taxes. Which makes me wonder, Jim, why is Biden running on a tax program that he knows has so little chance of becoming reality and when it’s pretty clear that he’s gotten a lot of stuff done without raising taxes? It turns out that’s not been all that essential to getting infrastructure or climate bills done. So why is he making this so central?

Several reasons. One of them is it’s very important to him rhetorically to talk about fiscal responsibility. Big parts of the Biden agenda, the CHIPS bill, the infrastructure bill, some other legislation, were not actually paid for. The spending and tax cuts were not offset by tax increases.

So they’re going to add to the debt.

Right. So they’re going to add to the debt. Same is true of the stimulus bill. But moving forward, the president has said that he’s going to pay for his agenda and he’s actually going to have some extra tax dollars coming in left over to help pay down future budget deficits. And on paper, it’s the way to pay for Biden’s other big, expansive plans that he hasn’t been able to do but wants to — universal child care, federal paid leave, investing in elder care, just a whole bunch of things that he still wants to do more — housing initiatives.

The president needs money to make a case that he’s being fiscally responsible, and this is the money that would do that.

So that’s one reason. Another reason is the calendar. Biden and his team are looking ahead to the end of 2025, and they know that if he wins another term, he will be in office at a rare moment in Washington, when basically tax policy has to be on the Congressional agenda.

Well, Republicans, when they passed their tax cuts in 2017, set a bunch of them to expire at the end of 2025 in order to lower the cost of the bill.

These are the Trump tax cuts.

The Trump tax cuts. And that includes all the tax cuts for individuals. So now that those are coming due, there’s going to be a fight in Washington over whether to extend them or make them permanent or change them in some way or just let them expire, and Democrats know there’s going to be a huge fight that will reach almost certainly the floor of the House and the Senate. And so Biden wants to be ready.

He wants to be ready with a suite of policy proposals that Democrats can basically pull off the shelf and try to use to put Republicans in a box. Basically say, we would like to keep taxes low or cut them further for low income workers, middle class workers. But we want to pay for that by raising taxes on the rich. You Republicans also want to do nice things for low and middle class workers, but you want to cut taxes for corporations and the rich, and we think that’s a political loser for you.

So Biden is ready with what they think will be a political winner for Democrats in this almost certain floor tax fight at the end of 2025.

And that brings us to the last reason why Biden is doing this, and maybe the most important, which is it’s really good politics.

Just explain that. Why is talking about tax increases, net tax increases, such good politics?

If you talk to Democratic pollsters, if you talk to people inside the White House, outside the White House, political strategists anywhere in Biden’s orbit, they all agree that the public loves the idea of forcing rich people and corporations to pay their, quote, “fair share.” It’s just become a winning and central political argument in Democratic campaigns, the idea that corporations avoid taxes, that rich people avoid taxes, and that Joe Biden is trying to position himself as a champion of the idea that they need to pay more. Those corporations and those rich people need to pay more, and he’s going to make it happen.

You’re describing this as something that is kind of a new political reality. Is that right?

Yeah, it’s evolved over the last decade or so I think. For a long time in Washington, the conventional wisdom was just couldn’t talk about tax increases of any kind. They were poison. There was a whole anti-tax movement that did a really good job of messaging that, and Democratic candidates got very scared of talking about raising taxes even on the very, very rich.

That started to turn over time. But it’s really changed. I think we saw in the 2020 election that the Democratic primary had just enormous amounts of taxes on corporations and the rich funding all sorts of policy proposals — Medicare for all and universal child care and trillions and trillions of dollars — and Democratic candidates like Liz Warren and Bernie Sanders competing to see who could tax corporations and the rich the most.

Biden is a product of that primary. He was one of the most moderate people in that group, but his proposals are really outside of the historical norm for Democratic candidates up until then. And that reflects the fact that pollsters have been doing all this research, finding that the American people, including independents and increasingly numbers of Republicans, just don’t think corporations pay their fair share and are open to the idea they should pay more.

This is really interesting, and it makes me think that what you’re really saying is that there might have been a time when a Democratic nominee like Joe Biden might have reveled in his image as an overall tax cutter. But that is not this moment, and that is not this candidate. He wants to be a tax increaser. He thinks that is where the politics are.

I think that’s exactly right when you think about tax increaser as tax increaser on the rich and on corporations. There’s two ways to be a successful populist politician. One of them is to be like Trump and run around saying you’re going to do enormous tax cuts for everybody, which is a Republican version of populism. Trump, my biggest tax cut in history, I’m going to do another huge, enormous tax cut. It’s going to be so big you won’t believe it.

There might have been a time when Democrats tried to follow that playbook. But Biden’s not doing that. He’s leaning into the other side of populism. He’s telling workers, hey, I’m on your side with these big companies. They’re trying to screw you, and I’m not going to stand for it. And so I’m going to raise their taxes. I’m going to make them pay more so that there’s more money for you, whether that’s more tax cuts or more programs or whatever.

And that is the Democratic version of populism right now, and that’s the one that Joe Biden is running on. And that’s why he’s so happy to talk about raising corporate taxes because it’s a way to tell workers, hey, I’m on your side.

Right. Even if that’s not what he’s done or ever may be able to do.

Yeah. Part of the problem with populism is that you make a lot of promises you can’t keep, and this certainly, in his first term, has been an area where the president has talked a much bigger game than he’s been able to execute. The second term might be different, but that doesn’t really matter for the campaign. What matters is the rhetoric.

Well, Jim, thank you very much. We appreciate it.

Thank you. Always a pleasure.

Here’s what else you need to know today. On Tuesday, Israel confirmed that it had carried out the airstrike that killed seven aid workers delivering food to civilians in Gaza. The attack, which occurred on Monday, struck a convoy run by the World Central Kitchen, a nonprofit group. At the time of the attack, the aid workers were traveling in clearly marked cars that designated them as non-combatants.

Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu described the attack as unintentional and said that his government deeply regretted the deaths. In its own statement, World Central Kitchen called the strike unforgivable and said that as a result, it would suspend its aid work in Gaza, where millions of people are in dire need of both food and medicine.

Today’s episode was produced by Stella Tan and Mary Wilson with help from Michael Simon Johnson. It was edited by Lisa Chow, contains original music by Dan Powell and Marion Lozano, and was engineered by Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk of Wonderly.

That’s it for “The Daily.” I’m Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.

• April 4, 2024   •   32:37 Israel’s Deadly Airstrike on the World Central Kitchen
• April 3, 2024   •   27:42 The Accidental Tax Cutter in Chief
• April 2, 2024   •   29:32 Kids Are Missing School at an Alarming Rate
• April 1, 2024   •   36:14 Ronna McDaniel, TV News and the Trump Problem
• March 29, 2024   •   48:42 Hamas Took Her, and Still Has Her Husband
• March 28, 2024   •   33:40 The Newest Tech Start-Up Billionaire? Donald Trump.
• March 27, 2024   •   28:06 Democrats’ Plan to Save the Republican House Speaker
• March 26, 2024   •   29:13 The United States vs. the iPhone
• March 25, 2024   •   25:59 A Terrorist Attack in Russia
• March 24, 2024   •   21:39 The Sunday Read: ‘My Goldendoodle Spent a Week at Some Luxury Dog ‘Hotels.’ I Tagged Along.’
• March 22, 2024   •   35:30 Chuck Schumer on His Campaign to Oust Israel’s Leader
• March 21, 2024   •   27:18 The Caitlin Clark Phenomenon

Hosted by Michael Barbaro

Featuring Jim Tankersley

Produced by Stella Tan and Mary Wilson

With Michael Simon Johnson

Edited by Lisa Chow

Original music by Dan Powell and Marion Lozano

Engineered by Chris Wood

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In his campaign for re-election, President Biden has said that raising taxes on the wealthy and on big corporations is at the heart of his agenda. But under his watch, overall net taxes have decreased.

Jim Tankersley, who covers economic policy for The Times, explains.

On today’s episode

Jim Tankersley , who covers economic policy at the White House for The New York Times.

Background reading

An analysis prepared for The New York Times estimates that the tax changes President Biden has ushered into law will amount to a net cut of about $600 billion over four years.

“Does anybody here think the tax code’s fair?” For Mr. Biden, tax policy has been at the center of his efforts to make the economy more equitable.

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Jim Tankersley writes about economic policy at the White House and how it affects the country and the world. He has covered the topic for more than a dozen years in Washington, with a focus on the middle class. More about Jim Tankersley

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