The SAT Transition Landscape

All 173 Transition questions in the official question bank, mapped by answer, distractor, and difficulty tier.

I started auditing the SAT's Transition questions earlier this month — wanting to know, with real precision rather than general impression, where the College Board concentrates its correct answers and its distractors on this question type. The audit began as research for my forthcoming book, but as the results stacked up, the patterns seemed worth making freely available. The full audit is now live as a permanent resource on walkerprep.com: The SAT Transition Landscape.

The scope, briefly: every Transition question in the College Board’s official online question bank — 173 questions in total, 692 answer choices. The bank assigns each question one of three difficulty levels — easy, medium, hard — which I grouped into two tiers: a harder one combining medium and hard, and an easier one. For each transition, the audit records how often it served as a correct answer and how often it appeared as a distractor, separated by tier.

A few of the patterns are of interest even if you don’t read the full report:

However, the most familiar of the contrast transitions, is one of the heaviest distractors on the harder questions. It appears among the choices fifteen times there and is correct in two. Nevertheless runs cooler still: twenty appearances on the harder questions, three of them correct. These familiar contrast words function chiefly as bait at the harder tier. The reliable key is by contrast, which sets parallel ideas in opposition and is correct in roughly half its harder-tier appearances.

For example and for instance, taken together, appear forty-one times among the harder questions and are never correct. On the harder tier they exist only to draw students who reach for what reads as natural.

Sequence words — next, later, meanwhile, finally — supply nearly a third of the correct answers on the easier questions and almost none of the answers on the harder ones. A time word among the choices on a hard question is, on this evidence, a great deal more often wrong than right.

The Same Direction category supplies the largest share of correct answers on the harder questions, but its difficulty is internal: it splits into six sub-functions — addition, emphasis, example, specification, restatement, similarity — and in roughly seven cases out of ten when one of those sub-functions is the answer, another of them appears among the distractors. That the relation is same-direction is rarely in doubt. Which kind — addition, emphasis, restatement — is the question.

Patterns like these don’t surface while you work questions one at a time. They appear only once the whole bank is counted in one place. Knowing these tendencies helps — but two caveats.

First, frequency tables are no substitute for substantive analysis. The points on Transition questions are earned by reading the logic across the blank — identifying the actual relation between two statements and choosing the word that expresses it. The audit shows where the test likes to put its answers and its traps. What it doesn’t do is teach you which is which. Second, the patterns reflect the question bank as it stood at the time of the audit. They are not fixed properties of the exam. As the bank changes, the patterns will too. I’ll update the tables when changes warrant it, so readers are encouraged to check back occasionally.

In the meantime, my hope is that students, parents, and colleagues in test prep find this resource useful. You can find the full landscape at the link:

→ The SAT Transition Landscape

~ Dave Walker