The May 2026 SAT: easy math, and a Reading section that punished people

That depends entirely on which section you mean, and May is the clearest case we have seen. Difficulty reports and reassurances came in at about the same rate, which usually means a middling exam. Read what students actually said and it wasn’t disagreement at all. The ones calling it easy meant math. The ones calling it brutal meant Reading and Writing.

Module 2 of Reading and Writing drew the strongest reaction. Students called it a clear step up from March, with long scientific passages and a heavy load of graph and table analysis. Plenty said they spent time on single questions that they would normally have banked for the end.

Math ran over standard ground. Proportional relationships, a perpendicular slope, a probability read off a table, the area of a rectangle, center and spread from a small data set. Where it was hard, it was hard in the familiar way: asking which function shows a property instead of asking you for a value.

May’s hardest reading questions weren’t about reading in the way most students prepare for it. They asked whether a piece of evidence supports a claim, usually with a figure or table attached, usually in dense scientific prose about a system you have never heard of.

That shift has a practical consequence. You prepare for Reading and Writing as though it rewards comprehension, when the hardest items reward argument analysis. Understanding every sentence of a passage about contaminant levels in river species doesn’t get you the point. Spotting that the researchers’ proposal depends on one species predicting the other, and that the weakening finding has to break exactly that link, does.

It costs so much time because comprehension feels like progress. If you don’t know what the question wants, you read the passage twice, understand it well, and still end up choosing between four findings that all sound plausible.

Plenty of students left May pleased about the math. Here’s what that does and doesn’t mean. It doesn’t mean a higher score. Equating adjusts for the difficulty of the form you sat, so a comfortable math section converts less generously than a punishing one.

There is a second reason not to relax. On an adaptive test, a math section that felt easy the whole way through can mean Module 1 routed you onto the lower-ceiling version of Module 2. If so, the comfort was a symptom, not an achievement. Students read an easy Module 2 as good news, and it is the one reading the design rules out.

So the useful takeaway from May is the opposite of the comfortable one. If math felt easy and Reading and Writing hurt, the thing to change isn’t the section that hurt. It is the balance between them, because you are almost certainly already giving math most of your time.

May’s hard reading questions were overwhelmingly evidence questions. A researcher proposes something, and you pick the finding that would most weaken or most support it. The passages were long and technical, which made them feel hard, but the technical content is almost never where the difficulty sits.

Every one of these rests on a single link. A proposal that crayfish can stand in for trout depends on the two species’ contaminant levels rising and falling together. If crayfish levels climb while trout levels stay flat, the substitution fails, and that is your weakening finding. A claim that languages spread after farming arrived depends on the date farming arrived. Move that date later than the languages and the claim collapses.

State the link in one sentence and three of the four choices become visibly irrelevant. You never need to have understood the biology. The decoys are predictable once you know the shape. One confirms the link when you were asked to break it. One talks about cost or convenience. One brings in a substance or period the claim never rested on. One has the right direction and absolute wording.

The math was broad and shallow: inequalities, perpendicular lines, probability from a two-way table, similarity criteria, area, center and spread. Nothing exotic, and students noticed. Perpendicular slopes are the usual one-line check: a line with slope 3 over 4 has a perpendicular of negative 4 over 3.

One cluster was the exception. It gave you two defined functions and asked which one shows a property in its equation, such as displaying its minimum value as a constant. These are where a calculator helps least and where confident students go wrong.

The distinction is conceptual and takes ten seconds once you know it. A decaying exponential approaches its constant without ever reaching it, so that constant is a floor and not a minimum. A growing one takes its smallest value at the left end of the interval, which is usually not the constant sitting in the equation. Graphing both tells you nothing here, because the question is about which form displays the value, not where the curve goes.

Original questions written around what this exam tested, one for each argument above. Nothing here is a real test question.

May is the sitting that should change your study balance. Most students give math the majority of their time because progress there is legible. You either solve it or you don’t. Reading and Writing feels less trainable, so it gets whatever is left.

The hardest questions on this form say otherwise. Evidence questions are as mechanical as any algebra item once you know what to look for. They deserve more of your attention than their reputation suggests, because the students losing points on them are usually the ones who read the passage most carefully.