In March, the overhauled SAT will make its debut (deep breath, people) and many parents and students are more than a little nervous about the changed test.

The College Board will ditch the mandatory essay in favor of an optional one; focus more on how words are used in context and how word choice shapes meaning, tone, and impact; and remove vocabulary words that Americans rarely use like prevaricator and ignominious and replace them with words more common in college curriculums (think empirical and synthesis). “It’s the end of [SAT] vocab as we know it,” says Miro Kazakoff, the CEO and co-founder of test-prep firm Testive.

On the math section, the new test will include more problems grounded in real-world contexts; more questions on functions, linear equations and proportional thinking; and students will no longer be able to (gasp!) use their calculators on one math section.

There will also be more math problems, verbal passages and other items that pertain to topics and issues in history, social studies and science — and greater use of texts by important figures like Mahatma Gandhi, Margaret Thatcher, and Henry David Thoreau or key documents like the Declaration of Independence or the Bill of Rights.

The scoring is also getting a makeover. The test will once again have a maximum score of 1600, rather than the current 2400. Students will get one point for a correct answer and there will be no deduction for an incorrect answer, whereas they used to get one point for each correct answer and a deduction for an incorrect answer; in both cases blank responses had no impact on scores.

So how would you perform on the new SAT? Here are 13 sample questions from the new test that will make you glad you’re no longer in high school.

(See the next page for the answers.)

This story has been updated.

Answers:

Reading:

1. B

Choice B is the best answer because it provides punctuation that creates two grammatically complete and standard sentences.

2. B

Choice B is the best answer because the colon after “parts” effectively signals that what follows in the sentence further defines what the “two parts” of Kingman’s name are and because the comma after “man” properly indicates that “‘king’ and ‘man’” and “Cantonese for ‘scenery’ and ‘composition’” are nonrestrictive appositives.

3. A

Choice A is the best answer because it creates a comparison between like terms: “works” by Kingman and “paintings by Chinese landscape artists.”

4. C

Choice C is the best answer because “departed” is the most contextually appropriate way to indicate that Kingman had deviated from the tradition of Chinese landscape painting in a number of ways.

5. C

Choice C is the best answer because placing sentence 3 after sentence 1 makes the paragraph most cohesive. Sentence 3 refers to Kingman’s “interest” being “so keen,” a callback to sentence 1, which says that “Kingman was keenly interested in landscape painting from an early age.”

6. C

Choice C is the best answer because it clearly establishes the main topic of the paragraph: Kingman’s urban landscapes.

7. D

Choice D is the best answer because it combines the sentences logically and efficiently, with the original second sentence becoming a participial phrase describing Kingman.

Math:

8. B

9. B

10. B

11. C

12. C

13. B