Last updated: September 2026 · By the AllSatPapers Content Team
December 2025 was the busiest single month in Digital SAT history, and it left behind six documents: two International capture sets (12A for Math, 12B for Reading & Writing), three complete US forms (12C, 12D, 12E), and a 392-question question bank (12F) that ties them all together. Read separately, each is a practice test. Read together, they're an x-ray of how the College Board builds adaptive exams — the same question families circulating with new names, numbers, and answer letters, across two difficulty routes.
This roundup maps the whole month: what's in each file, how heavily they overlap, which families repeat, how December connects backward to November and forward to June 2026 — and which pieces to buy first.
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December 2025 at a Glance
| Form | What it is | Contents | Answers |
|---|---|---|---|
| 12A | International — Math only | Bluebook captures: Math Module 1 + Module 2 Hard route (137 pages, one question per screen) | Student selections marked in the captures |
| 12B | International — English only | R&W Module 1 + Module 2 captures, including Hard-route material (243 pages, two-panel layout) | Marked selections visible |
| 12C | US — full form | 98 questions (R&W 27 + 27, Math 22 + 22); Math Module 2 is the easier adaptive route — fully mapped in our 12C breakdown | No key; several marked choices; the rest verified by our team |
| 12D | US — full form | 98 questions; essentially all of its content also lives in the 12F bank (overlap: 123.5% of the form) | No key; working set verified by our team |
| 12E | US — full form | 98 questions; 117.3% overlap with the 12F bank; only 3 questions found nowhere else | No key; working set verified by our team |
| 12F | Question bank — not a sat form | 392 parsed questions (R&W 108 + 108, Math 88 + 88); both adaptive routes' material; 74 bank-exclusive items | No key printed in the text |
One Month, One Question Ecosystem
Our 12C breakdown first mapped December's shared question families; we've since verified each branch against the actual text of 12D, 12E, and the 12F bank. The headline: the College Board didn't write six tests — it ran one ecosystem, swapping costumes on a fixed set of skeletons:
- Fossil brood care (K. popovi, Haifanggou Formation): researcher Yanzhe Fu in 12C, Chenyang Cai in 12D — and three versions in the 12F bank, two naming Cai and one naming Diying Huang.
- Lighthouse keepers (notes): Barbara Mabrity & Thelma Austin (Florida) in 12C; Catherine A. Moore & Flora McNeil (Connecticut) in 12D; Elizabeth Smith of Old Field Point Light, New York, in the 12F bank — where Austin reappears, relocated to Point Fermin Light, California.
- Hours worked 1950–2017 (econ table): Switzerland highlighted in 12C; the Netherlands version (−564 hours) in 12E — repeated verbatim in the 12F bank.
- Hidalgo municipalities (notes): Huazalingo (12,766) in 12C; Pisaflores vs Metztitlán in 12D; Tlahuelilpan (17,153 → 19,067) in 12E; two further retunes in the bank.
- Stony coral depth table: 12C, 12D, and two versions in 12F.
- Taam Ja' Blue Hole: the 274 m vs 420 m depth puzzle in 12C and 12D (answer letter moved B → D), plus the full passage in 12F.
- Great Salt Lake salinity: north-vs-south arm in 12C; Ephydra cinerea vs Achromobacter in 12E; the bank carries 12E's version.
- "Mustang"/"hackamore" etymology: 12C and 12E share the passage with the blank moved; the bank holds three versions, including one asking about "quirt."
- Apollo Moon sensors: 12C, 12D, 12E (naming researcher Seiichi Nagihara), and two bank versions.
- Cooking-oil smoke point: sesame at 410°F in 12C; safflower at 510°F in 12D and 12F.
- Indigenous songs / languages: a speaker-count table in 12C; Kwakwaka'wakw clam-garden and Karen bee songs in 12D and 12F.
- Pregnant beaver scatterplot: 12D, plus three coordinate-shifted copies in 12F (the 50-pound beaver always produced 6 offspring).
- Chimpanzee UVB adaptation: 12C, 12D, and two bank versions — Sophie Moittié's zoo-chimpanzee vitamin D study.
- DOM2 horse domestication: two near-identical completions, found only in 12F.
One nuance worth stating plainly: not every form carries every family. 12E, for instance, has no brood-care passage, no lighthouse notes, and no blue hole — December dealt each form a different hand from the same deck.
The Two-Route Adaptive Story
December is the cleanest demonstration yet of the adaptive algorithm's two branches. Form 12C's Math Module 2 is the easier route: one-step equations (80 − w = 50), single-percent increases ($5 → $20), plug-in evaluation (f(8) = √(64 − 15) = 7). Form 12A's captures are the hard route: a 67-question elite Module 2 pool of parameterized discriminants, cylinder surface area via circumference, and radical perimeters. Same test date, same module number — two entirely different exams.
The English side splits too: 12B's 243 pages include material explicitly headed "Module 2 – Hard," with a 147-year literary span from Mark Twain (1876) to Rachel Heng's The Great Reclamation (2023). And the 12F bank bundles both routes' worth of material in one file — easy-route one-steppers sitting pages away from hard-route radian conversions — which is exactly what makes it the month's best training document.
The Overlap Map
Measured from each live form's side (matches as a share of that form's 98 questions):
| Pair | Share of the form | Reading |
|---|---|---|
| 12D ↔ 12F bank | 123.5% | Essentially all of 12D is in the bank — some items twice |
| 12E ↔ 12F bank | 117.3% | 92 of 98 questions verbatim, 23 more retuned |
| 12C ↔ 12F bank | 60.2% | Mostly retunes — 12C kept the most exclusive content (42 items) |
| 12D ↔ 12C | 30.6% | The two US forms share a third of a test |
| 12E ↔ 12C | 11.2% | Including the verbatim Ella-evaporation function |
| 12D ↔ 12E | 10.2% | Epistolary-novel notes, y-intercept skeletons |
How can an overlap exceed 100%? Because the 12F bank stores near-duplicate copies of many questions, so one live-form item can match multiple bank entries. Measured from the bank's side, its 392 questions overlap 12D at 43.1%, 12E at 35.5%, and 12C at 26.3% — plus 74 items with no match anywhere.
Chains: November → December → June
December didn't start from scratch. From our cross-form data: September's 9J question bank appears on every December document's overlap list (9.2% of 12D, 9.2% of 12E, 7.1% of 12F, 4.1% of 12C), and November's 11D touches all four as well (8.2% of 12D, 5.9% of 12F, 3.1% each of 12C and 12E). October's 10D, November's 11A and 11E, and even August's 8G bank and May's 5E contribute single-digit threads — the mustang etymology, the Defoe Storm passage, and the y-intercept skeleton all trace back months.
Looking forward — as mapped in our 12C breakdown — the stony coral depth table and the Dolly Parton / Appalachian ballads family reach the June 2026 6A form, while the Ella Wheeler Wilcox poem set and the community-art passage resurface in the June 6H question bank. The bank even holds two Dolly versions of its own ("Silver Dagger" and "The Cuckoo"). December's content has a long half-life in both directions.
Buying Guide: What to Get First
- Start with 12F. The question bank is December's best coverage per dollar: most of the month's live content across both adaptive routes, plus 74 questions seen nowhere else. It's the drill reservoir.
- Add 12C for a clean, sequenced full form — the month's reference exam, with the easier-route Math Module 2 that makes it a perfect diagnostic (and the form our full breakdown decodes).
- 12A + 12B together reconstruct the International exam — hard-route math captures plus two full R&W modules' worth of captures, with marked selections. International December sitters should treat this pair as their paper.
- Don't skip 12D and 12E — their questions live largely inside 12F, but only these files preserve them as real, sequenced, 98-question exams. Sit them timed; mine the bank for reps afterward.
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Five Tips for Prepping With the December Set
- Climb the difficulty ladder. Master 12C's easy-route Math Module 2 first — if any item takes more than 90 seconds, fix that topic — then graduate to 12A's 67 hard-route captures.
- Drill by family, not by form. Pull the bank's three brood-care items or three beaver scatterplots in one sitting. When the researcher changes but the main idea doesn't, the skeleton is yours.
- Never memorize letters. The bank reshuffles choice order between copies — Dickens's "accepted" is C in 12E and B in the bank. Solve the question; the letter is packaging.
- Read the ask before the notes. December's notes-synthesis items keep the bullets and change the goal — 12C's Great Salt Lake item compares lake regions; 12E's contrasts two organisms.
- Use the forms as game film, the bank as practice. Sit 12C, 12D, or 12E under a timer; then train weak spots against 12F's duplicates, and save its 74 exclusives for a final untimed pass.
Every Digital SAT Paper in Our Archive
All forms below are available individually or in bundles:
2023
- March 2023 (3A) · May 2023 (5A) · June 2023 (6A, Easy & Hard) · October 2023 (10A) · November 2023 (11A) · December 2023 (12A–12D)
2024
- March 2024 (3A–3D) · May 2024 (5A–5D) · June 2024 (6A–6E) · August 2024 (8A–8I) · October 2024 (10A–10G) · November 2024 (11A–11F) · December 2024 (12A–12H)
2025
- March 2025 (3A–3H) · May 2025 (5A–5F) · June 2025 (6A–6E) · August 2025 (8A–8F + 8G Question Bank) · September 2025 (9A–9I + 9J Question Bank) · October 2025 (10A–10H, 10I/10J School Day, 10K Question Bank) · November 2025 (11A–11G) · December 2025 (12A Math only, 12B English only, 12C, 12D, 12E, 12F Question Bank — compared above)
2026
- March 2026 (3A Question Bank) · May 2026 (5A–5G) · June 2026 (6A–6G + 6H Question Bank)
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Last updated: September 2026. All test content referenced under fair use for educational analysis. SAT® is a registered trademark of the College Board, which was not involved in the production of, and does not endorse, this analysis or any products offered on this site.