SHSAT ELA COURSE

There is an old wives  tale in the SHSAT community that students should save the official practice exams for the very end of training, right before the exam. That advice may have made some sense five years ago when there was a limited number of official questions to access. Nobody argues that the official content is the best reflection of the actual exam, so the theory is akin to “save the best tidbits for the end.”

Today, however, the situation is different and that advice is wrong. There is a wealth of official SHSAT content for practice: about 10 full exams, over 50 ELA passages, and a repository of over 1,000 questions, enough for a complete training program.

Our advice is to start with the official SHSAT material. Learn the correct habits from the start because you will test the same way you practice and, if you spend most of your time working with content that may well be different, then you are more likely to develop bad habits. We recommend students ultimately use a variety of sources, but the official material is the best place to begin. Moreover, when you do add extra sources, you will better be able to assess the quality of those sources and identify which questions are realistic test questions and which are not.

The new digital SHSAT exam for 2025 includes a multi-colored highlighter. We think this is one of the best new tools on the exam. Having delivered digital format SHSAT ELA content for 10 years, we have come to use the highlighter effectively, and now you can on the real exam. For example, when reading any passage, we advise students to be proactive with the text and finish each passage with the following purposeful information before they attack the questions.

1. Main Idea – Who/what is the topic and why did the author care to write about the topic?
2. Who is telling the story, and what is their attitude and tone?
3. What is the progression of ideas (usually paragraph by paragraph or stanza by stanza)?

The last item, number 3, is often the hardest for students to gain comfort executing quickly, but the results provide powerful benefits: better big picture comprehension of the passage, the ability to locate evidence in the passage more quickly, and improved ability to answer questions, which frequently reference specific paragraph ideas.

The multicolored highlighter makes it easy to follow the progression of passage ideas to gain a solid big picture understanding. In the example below, notice how each paragraph topic sentence outlines the flow of ideas. In fact, it is easy to read “just” the highlights and provide a reasonably good summary of the passage. When the direction of ideas change, we often change the color. Notice, how we shift from yellow to green when the creature appears in the story. Also, notice how strong punctuation is highlighted with a different color, blue. In this case, the question marks emphasize the narrator’s uncertainty. His guess of the creature’s identity progresses from whale to octopus to finally giant squid (inferred, not actually stated).

In addition, the new digital SHSAT allows users to review the paragraph or relevant section of text side by side with the question and highlight relevant keywords based on the question conditions and answers provided. In the example below, the yellow text is the line reference. It describes a moment encountered by the narrator. The blue text provides the key context to help answer the question: the moment is now, but the feeling will soon be distant. The correct answer reflects this core idea.

What about the other ELA digital tools from the SRT?

Bookmarks: The bookmark tool is another useful tool to flag questions for review. It is a helpful way to manage your time and avoid spending too much time on any one problem (a potential nuclear mistake). If the solution is not clear, do not guess and do not waste time with a question you will likely answer incorrectly anyway. Flag the question. Move on to easier questions and pick the low hanging fruit. Later, return to the trickier question. You may see it in a different light. Depending on the 2026 adaptive test design, this tool may become obsolete.

Notes: We use our notetaking tool with the highlighter to comment on specific text. For example, we might comment a highlight is an “example” of the previous text. The SRT notes tool appears to apply to an entire passage without location specifics. If true, we think the note tool will be significantly more limited in its usefulness.

Hot Text & Inline Choice: These tools seem to have obvious applications to the Revising-Editing exam sections; however, we doubt they add much value versus multiple choice. We are concerned the test designers will get too happy with their shiny new toys and implement new answer formats simply because they can. Note, the SAT went digital and they did not change their answer formats. Rather than introduce the confusion of new answer input formats, they kept the grid-in and multiple choice options only to avoid additional student confusion while making so many other changes. That said, I suspect our concerns apply more to math because these new text formats are fairly easy to understand even for new users.