Khan Academy Digital SAT Review – How Good Is It? 

Khan Academy's new Digital SAT course struggled in most areas we evaluated, ranking lower than their paper-based SAT course.

But does that mean that this free Digital SAT prep course - a course developed in partnership with the makers of the SAT, the College Board - is a waste of your time?

In this post, you'll get an objective review to help you decide whether this new Digital SAT course from Khan Academy is right for you based on our first-hand experience using the platform.

Main Features & Course Line-Up

This is a self-paced online prep course, which you can find on KhanAcademy.org/digital-SAT. Simply creating an account on their website give you unlimited lifetime access to all their Digital SAT learning resources at no cost.

Khan Academy offers no live SAT online classes on its platform, at the time of this review.

Lesson Quality

Now, let's start off by diving into the quality of lessons found on the course. The course is divided into two sections: one for the Digital SAT Math and the other for the Digital SAT Reading and Writing.

In each of these sections, you will find multiple learning modules - which they call units - that are organized in groups according to 3 levels of skill difficulty: foundations, medium, and advanced.

Each learning unit could contain up to 12 mini-concept lessons.

The lesson material is presented using a combination of text-based guides and screen-recorded videos hosted on their YouTube channel.

But note that most of the videos on this course are familiar productions for the Digital SAT.

Instead, you get videos from their old collection of general Math and English videos that are not SAT-specific, or are videos produced for their old paper-based SAT course.

Nonetheless, I like their approach of introducing each lesson concept using text-based guides and video lessons.

As that benefits students who are either visual learners or text learners.

I also like that each introductory lesson is followed by video examples of a teacher attempting actual SAT practice problems.

Which helps you relate the general concept taught in the lesson to an actual SAT question.

Unsurprisingly, the identical downside I found in their paper-based SAT course exists in this Digital SAT course.

Which is the heavy focus on top-down solution strategies and not bottom-up solution strategies in their lessons.

Khan Academy is suitable if you need a refresher on general topics tested on the Digital SAT.

But don't rely on Khan Academy to reveal proven strategies to help you crack the Digital SAT.

As that'll be in conflict with what the College Board wants you to believe about the uncrackable nature of their SAT exam.

Support Quality

As for the quality of support, Khan Academy doesn't have much to offer.

As mentioned earlier, Khan Academy does not offer live online classes where students can connect directly with an SAT instructor.

Neither is there on-demand access to an instructor via email.

However, there is a discussion section at the bottom of each lesson where you can leave comments or questions and get feedback from other platform users.

While there is no instructor access to the Khan Academy Digital SAT course, you should know that you can get free SAT prep tutoring from the peer-to-peer tutoring platform called Schoolhouse.

Schoolhouse was launched by the founder of Khan Academy and offers a free 4-week SAT boot camp run by volunteer peer tutors from around the globe.

Practice Material Quality 

You get a decent bank of over 850 practice questions in practice material on the Khan Academy Digital SAT course.

However, these questions are not located in a separate practice test bank, as in other Digital SAT prep courses.

Instead, they are found in multiple locations, such as practice drills at the end of each concept lesson and in the unit quizzes and tests.

However, only the unit quizzes and unit test questions are similar to Digital SAT questions.

Just like the lessons, practice questions are grouped by skill level.

Such that you can attempt questions in the practice drills, unit quizzes, and unit tests that are at your skill level.

Then, move up to a higher difficult level until you've peaked at the highest skill level for that concept.

At the time of this review, there is no diagnostic quiz on the Khan Academy Digital SAT course platform that can help you identify your weak and strong areas early.

Which is a significant downside. So, you'll have to rely on other resources to determine your starting point.

And as for Digital SAT practice tests, none are on the platform.

While Khan Academy maintains an exclusive partnership with the College Board, they no longer have the edge over other SAT test prep providers, that allowed them to serve full-length official SAT practice questions online.

All official full-length Digital SAT practice tests are only available using the Bluebook app.

As for the answer explanations, Khan Academy does an excellent job of providing detailed text-based explanations to all practice questions.

But while we liked the depth of their text-based explanations, we'd have wanted to see video explanations, which benefit visual learners.

While on practice material, I found the practice environment on the Khan Academy Digital SAT course lacking multiple features that can help test takers mimic real Digital SAT test-taking conditions.

For one, there is no countdown timer while attempting the practice drills, unit quizzes, and tests on the platform.

So it would help if you found other means of pacing yourself; otherwise, you end up attempting these questions in an untimed environment, which is not a good prep strategy.

Secondly, compared to other Digital SAT course platforms, Khan Academy does not provide an on-screen desmos graphing calculator for the math practice section.

Other Features 

Khan Academy has a user-friendly mobile app for students who want to study on the go, which is available for both Android and iOS users.

The app can read articles and watch video lessons on the platform. However, the feature to attempt practice questions is unavailable on this app.

A notable feature of the paper-based SAT course on Khan Academy was the option to link your College Board account.

Students who connected their accounts and had taken official SAT or PSAT exams could receive an analysis of their past performances.

This integration provided personalized recommendations for practice questions, targeting areas for improvement in SAT scores.

However, this really cool feature is no longer present in the Digital SAT course from Khan Academy at the time of this review.

Who Should Use the Khan Academy Digital SAT Course

As you can see, many of the features of the Khan Academy paper-based SAT courses that gave this free course an edge over paid SAT courses no longer exist.

And for that reason, I no longer recommend Khan Academy as highly as I did in the past.

However, as a free resource, Khan Academy is an ideal choice for those students and families who can't afford to pay for SAT prep resources.

Particularly those who require minimal student support in their SAT prep or those who prefer to study independently.

Suppose that's not you, and you're looking for a cheap but effective Digital SAT prep. In that case, I recommend looking into an affordable Digital SAT self-paced prep course like Prepscholar.