[apparent]

The fact that it's not all multiple choice now makes it somewhat harder. Multiple choice questions make it much faster to solve some questions because you can simply plug in possible answers. They also make it easier to know that you're right, if you solve a problem and the answer you got is one of the choices (though they do sometimes include common mistaken answers to fool students).

[somenameforme]

No idea what the SAT is like now a days (based on the comments in this thread) but 'back in the day' if you knew enough about a problem to understand the math needed to solve it, which is needed to plug in the answer, then it'd generally be faster to just solve than working backwards since the number of steps would typically be less than repeatedly plugging in. And most/all questions also had a 'None of the above' option that was the answer a fair chunk of the time.

Another practical thing is that tests seem to trend substantially higher in difficulty when multiple choice. I was part of the first class at my university that took a calculus program which was multiple choice and we thought it was going to be a cake walk. But suddenly like every single test problem was using obscure trigonometric tricks on top of the basic calculus itself. And of course no partial credit for getting everything 95% right and missing one really disguised trig trick at the end. Grades for the class were significantly lower than prior years, because those tests were just nuts - and I'm a very much a math guy.

[WalterBright]

> though they do sometimes include common mistaken answers to fool students

Ya, I quickly noticed that, and so didn't at all take for granted that a matching result was correct.