skills for these exams and
beyond.PACE YOURSELF
LOTD should remind us about something very important: There’s a very good chance that you won’t
answer every question on the test.
Think about it this way. There are 5 passages and 52 questions on the Reading Test. You’ve got 65
minutes to complete those questions. Now, everyone knows that the Reading Test is super long and
boring, and 52 questions in 65 minutes probably sounds like a ton. The great news is that you don’t have
to work all 52 of these questions. After all, do you think you read most effectively when you’re in a huge
rush? You might do better if you worked only four of the passages and LOTD’d the rest. There’s nothing in
the test booklet that says that you can’t work at your own pace.
Pace, Don’t Race
For more about pacing on
the SAT, watch our online
videos in the
Premium Portal.Let’s say you do all 52 Reading questions and get half of them right. What raw score do you get from that?
That’s right: 26.
Now, let’s say you do only three of the 10-question Reading passages and get all of them right. It’s
conceivable that you could because you’ve now got all this extra time. What kind of score would you get
from this method? You bet: 30—and maybe even a little higher because you’ll get a few freebies from
your Letter of the Day.
In this case, and on the SAT as a whole, slowing down can get you more points. Unless you’re currently
scoring in the 650+ range on the two sections, you shouldn’t be working all the questions. We’ll go into
this in more detail in the later chapters, but for now remember this:
Slow down, score more. You’re not scored on how many questions you do. You’re scored on how
many questions you answer correctly. Doing fewer questions can mean more correct answers
overall!EMBRACE YOUR POOD
Embrace your what now? POOD! It stands for “Personal Order of Difficulty.” One of the things that SAT
has dispensed with altogether is a strict Order of Difficulty—in other words, an arrangement of problems
that puts easy ones earlier in the test than hard ones. In the absence of this Order of Difficulty (OOD), you