SATs 2025 grammar test predictions for last-minute prep.

Our resident SATs expert, Sophie Bartlett, is back with her predictions for the SATs 2025 grammar paper. 🔮 She shares the most likely content domains to appear on this year’s test, along with some helpful practice questions from past papers for some last-minute revision.

How do the SATs come round so quickly every year?! One minute you’re putting the half-bald tinsel on the lopsided classroom tree and the next minute, you’re knee deep in past papers with mere days to go…

The best ways to prepare for the SATs 2025 grammar paper 

We spoke here about how to best structure those last couple of weeks before the tests. As always, the most productive way is, of course, to analyse your own class’s gaps and teach towards those. 

However, we can also try to be clever and aim our last-minute revision towards those questions that are more likely to appear (all of the following analysis has been done using the English grammar, punctuation and spelling test framework).

What are the most common grammar content domains? 

G1 and G5 have always been the most common content domains, as shown here.

These two content domains collectively make up over half of the SPAG paper. This proportion has also consistently been lower than the amount of marks needed to pass the paper,  meaning that –theoretically– you could achieve EXS by correctly answering questions from only these two content domains.

The proportion of marks assigned to each of these content domains makes sense as they are also the largest in the curriculum (G1 and G5 have 12 and 15 strands within them, respectively).

Content domain for paper 1

Breaking down individual strands 

Here is the full breakdown of all the individual strands and how frequently they have appeared (some questions are assigned more than one strand).

Top 10 most common strands so far

This table shows the top 10 most common strands (so far).

This gives us a good idea of where to focus any last-minute revision!

Example questions from past SATs papers

Here are some example questions from past SATs papers relevant to each of those top 10 strands.

G5.9: Punctuation for parenthesis

G6.1: Synonyms and antonyms

G5.8: Apostrophes (contraction and possession)

G1.4: Conjunctions

G2.2: Questions

G4.4: Passive and active

G6.2: Prefixes

G1.2: Verbs

G1.6: Adverbs

G3.4: Subordinating conjunctions and subordinate clauses

Nailing these top 10 strands with your class will make this last-minute lead up to SATs a whole lot easier. Good luck! 😊

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