Speaker 1: One of the key challenges of doing well in SAT reading is managing your time, and we're going to talk about managing your time and pacing, which is just another way of saying using your time effectively, in two different ways. Now first, let's just review there are 65 minutes in the SAT reading section, 52 questions, 5 passages, so you're going to have about 1.25 minutes per question. So it's not too bad in terms of the pacing, you might still find yourself a bit rushed towards the end, or not, you know it depends on the student, but overall the timing of this isn't as bad say on the ACT reading, or even as it was on the old SAT reading. So I think overall the time isn't too bad, but there are two different kinds of problems you can have with time, and that's what I want to talk about in this video, and give you some suggestions on how you can overcome those challenges. The first one, which I've alluded to a little bit, is running out of time. This is the typical problem most students have with an SAT or an ACT, it's a time test, you can't just take your time and complete the questions at your leisure, you've got to do it within the time allotted. So you might find some problems running out of time, even though you've got 65 minutes for the whole section. And let's talk about some ways you might be able to address that. The first thing you need to check is to make sure that you're following the core strategy as I've laid it out. So if you're having problems with time, I think my strategy is generally the best way to use your time as efficiently and effectively as you can. So if you're, for example, doing the questions in order, you're probably attacking the passage inefficiently. As you've seen in the previous videos on Tests 1 and 2, I've done the questions completely out of order. I've done the questions based on the approach that I described in the core strategy video. In addition, if you're reading the passage before you go to the questions, and you're underlying and annotating the text very carefully and spending a lot of time figuring out what's going on in the passage, and then you go to the questions, and you find yourself running out of time, again, you're not really following the best strategy. Reading through the passage, as we've discussed previously, before going to the questions is not going to be as good as going right to the questions, answering them, and using them as basically a guide to help you read the passage. So if you're having problems with time, before you start experimenting with other things, make sure you're following the strategy effectively, and make sure you've practiced it. I mean, just because, you know, if you do the strategy once and you still run out of time, it doesn't mean anything. You've got to do it four, five, six, ten times before you can really get used to the strategy and see how it's working for you. If there's a particular passage type that's giving you trouble, leave it until the end, and I'll talk about passage types in the next video. But for example, let's say the dual passage gives you a lot of trouble. Or let's say you burn a lot of time on the fiction passage, whatever it might be. You might want to leave that one until the end, complete the other four passages, and then leave any hard passage, general passage category, until the last one, so that you know you've finished the easiest questions that are easy for you, and you're leaving any hard questions or passages until the end. Again, what you want to avoid, like imagine if you did, let's say passage two, let's say passage three was the dual. And let's say that you're not as good on the dual questions. So let's say you spend a lot of time on that dual passage. You don't get very many correct, we'll just say, and then you have to rush through passages four and five. Notice you've kind of harmed yourself twice by spending that much time on the dual, and then by not having enough time for the passages that follow. Instead, if you go passage one, passage two, skip three, passage four, passage five, then do passage three, you're going to more effectively finish one, two, four, and five, get more points there than you did previously, and then you've got whatever time left to do your best on three. Again, just a general strategy, if a passage is giving you trouble, leave it until the end. More specifically, narrowing our focus a little bit, if a problem seems like it's going to be difficult, do it last, or leave it until the end of the test. So I'll talk more about this, or more about hard questions specifically in the attacking hard questions video. But let's say there's a question in the passage about, I don't know, it's an analogy question, or it's an assumption question, it's a type that you know is difficult, difficult in general, more difficult for you, whatever the case may be. You can either A, leave that until the end, do all the other questions with that passage, and then as the last question with that passage, do the one that you left until the end, or leave it until the end completely, completely skip it, finish everything else, and then come back to that last question, because again, you don't want to spend a ton of time on a really hard question when you've got stuff still that you've got to do. So if a particular question or problem type is giving you trouble, skip it, leave it until the end, or completely leave it until the end of the test. The circle and return technique is also a useful strategy. So let's say you do a question, you get an answer, but you'd still like more time to review it, to reread the passage, to recheck the choices, like you're still not 100% certain on your answer, or maybe you don't even have an answer at all, you're kind of waffling between two. Instead of spending the time in that moment, rereading the passage, dumping a lot of time, investing a lot of time into that question, it's better that you circle the question number in your booklet, return to it later. So it's kind of like step three, except in step four, you can do this on any question, even if you get an answer, and you want to have more time to review it later, do it later, do it at the end, not before you've done all the other questions. Because the theory is you do want to review and check those questions that are giving you a little bit of trouble, but you don't want to do it in the middle of the test. You've got to get everything else done first, get all the easy stuff out of the way, then return to all the questions that either you skipped or you circled after you finished everything else. Again, just in terms of strategy, you want to make sure you can get the easy points, that you don't run out of time on easy questions, and leave anything difficult until the end. And the worst case scenario, process of elimination, guess, and move on. If you can get down to a 50-50, that's awesome. Most of the time you should be able to get down to a 50-50. So if you have to, eliminate what you can, guess, and move on. The general rule of thumb is you don't want to get bogged down. A lot of times what happens when students are running out of time is they're spending a disproportionate amount of time on a select few questions. It's not that, let's say you've got 65 minutes, it's not like you're spending, instead of 1.25 minutes per question, that you're spending 1.3 minutes per question on average. Well, 1.3 minutes per question on every question. It's probably that you're spending five minutes on this question, two minutes on this one, three minutes on this one, and that's what's eating up your time. It's those whale questions, those questions that are really disproportionately affecting your approach. You don't want to get bogged down, skip, move on, keep moving, is the general rule of thumb when it comes to running out of time. And again, a lot of this applies to any of the sections, but this is primarily, of course, for reading. But you can use a lot of these same things in the math and the writing, and we'll review this and talk about this as well in those sections, in those videos. Now there's a second issue, which is kind of the opposite of not having enough time, and that's having too much time. And I don't mean having too much time as if that's a bad thing, right, you'd like to have a lot of time. But really I mean by that, losing focus. The idea of reading and doing questions for 65 minutes in one huge chunk is quite a bit to swallow. It's a little bit hard to handle for many students, just because that's a lot of time sitting in your chair doing one thing, having that kind of focus. And sometimes you might find that your focus is waning a little bit, that you're losing track of what you've read in the passage. You know, you may have had that experience where you read a paragraph and it's like it went in one ear and out the other. So what if you're struggling with the amount of stuff you have to do, the amount of time? Again, make sure you're following the core strategy. So the core strategy is designed to be efficient and effective, so that you're not burning unnecessary energy and using your focus unprofitably, right? So if you're having problems with the length of the section, again, make sure you're following the core strategy. If you're reading through the passages all at once, and you find yourself, you know, your mind is blank, and when you're reading the whole passage through, part of the problem you're having there is you're reading the passage through first, we don't advise you doing that. So right, if you're following the core strategy, it can definitely help keep you focused on what you have to do. Related to this, you always want to be reading with a mission or reading with a goal. As we discussed in our core strategy, as we discussed working through these passages, we're always reading, looking for the answer to a specific question. And by specific question, I don't necessarily mean like a line reference question, I just mean one of the questions, whether it's specific or general, you're always reading with the question in mind. And you can treat the section, treat the test like a word search, right? You're searching in the passage for answers, for specific pieces of evidence that will give you answers to questions. You're not reading generally, you're not trying to get the main idea, unless of course there's a question about the main idea. You're reading to answer questions and that can help keep you focused and attentive. Well, as we've discussed in the previous part of this video, don't get bogged down, keep moving, right? So if you find yourself getting sluggish, you got to pick up the pace, move, skip the question, skip the passage, do whatever you got to do to keep your attention and focus the highest it can be. Treasure passages that are interesting or fun to you, but don't burn a bunch of time simply because you're having fun. So, you know, some passages in this test actually aren't too bad. I mean, I find that the passages on the internet and social media that they've had so far have been reasonably interesting and I'm pretty big into science, so I like science passages. Not so much into, you know, some of the history ones or maybe some of the fiction ones, but there are some that I quite like and you might have some passages that you quite like. And that's great because if they are interesting, they can keep your focus and you'll actually do better on them if you're more interested in them. But just because it's a fun passage, again, flip side of this, don't spend a lot of time on it because you enjoy reading it. You got to use the same lessons that we've talked about previously the first half of this video. Keep moving, answer your questions, don't dilly-dally, keep up the pace. Finally, just a general mindset. Develop a curious mindset, right? Anything can be interesting if you look at it from a certain inquisitive type perspective. So look for contrast between ideas, look for disagreements, look for surprises, look for arguments. Generally speaking, you know, the thesis or the argument, but also when two people disagree, when they have a fight about something, when there's a contrast or a difference. That's what's interesting about passages and the more you can find that, the more inquisitive, the more curious you are about maybe what's going on in the passage. Again, it just heightens your attention a little bit, maybe heightens your interest and heightens your focus. Finally, the point, the little tip that can help for both of these, whether you're running out of time or you have too much time is practice, practice, practice, right? You will get better with practice. You will get better with time. And this doesn't just mean necessarily practicing reading SAT passages, certainly that's part of it. As we'll talk about in the last video of this entire series, it's important as well to read stuff outside of the SAT. So read quality nonfiction and fiction materials to help continually build up your reading skill and reading abilities because as you get, as you become a better reader, not only will you read more efficiently, you'll lose, you'll use less energy to read, but you will figure out how to understand a passage, how to find the interesting pieces of it, how to figure out what matters and do so without burning yourself out. So keep practicing with your SAT, keep practicing reading. We'll talk more about this in the last video, but that will help both with running out of time and with having too much.