<p>My dd is due to take the SAT for the first time on March 1st (she's a Junior) </p>
<p>She took her first practice test today. She didn't have many incorrect, but she left a lot at the end unanswered, because she ran out of time -- sometimes as many as 10 or 15 questions in each section. </p>
<p>The same thing happened on the PSAT -- she didn't miss many questions, but we both noticed, at the end, that she ran out of time and left quite a few unanswered.</p>
<p>Will doing practice tests help her with increasing her speed? Or is there something else she should be doing? </p>
<p>Thanks!</p>
<p>Yes, taking more practice tests will not only increase speed, but it is also the best way to prepare because she will become more familiar with the type of questions, answers choices, and even be able to predict questions on the CR section. What section is she having most trouble on? What score is she aiming for on each section? Say on math for example, the more she takes practice tests, not only will she realize that she is running out of time, but she might be making some careless mistakes on the medium questions. She needs to leave herself 5-7 minutes to check over her work to search for those mistakes, that should be her goal. </p>
<p>For Passages, she should not read the whole passage at once. Read it one paragraph at a time, and then answer the questions based on that paragraph. If she's losing time over deciding which answer is best, then have her implement this strategy: cross out the answer choices that have no supported evidence. The more practice tests she takes, the better she'll be able to recognize the wrong answers that have nothing to do with passages that are not supported by evidence.</p>
<p>The suggestions sound great!! </p>
<p>Thanks for your help!</p>
<p>Oh! Forgot to add her "hopeful scores"!</p>
<p>She needs at least a 550 on each section for her 1st choice school (James Madison University in Virginia)</p>
<p>She does very well on the writing sections -- she averages in the low 600's there</p>
<p>Critical Reading and Math are her tough ones -- and, as you said, she gets bogged down, trying to read the entire passage.</p>
<p>A 550? Well then tell her to not even focus on the hard questions. She needs to devote all her time to the Easy and Medium questions and getting those right. If she finds herself stuck on one problem too long, she needs to skip it. </p>
<p>For passages, this is what I do: look at all the line references in the questions and quickly mark them with your pencil(ie underline the word references and put big brackets around lines). Do this quickly though to save time. When this is done, it makes the passage look easier and like little pieces. It's like a pizza: it looks daunting to just eat the whole thing, but if you make some cuts and divide it up into 8 pieces, it doesn't look too bad. Just one piece at a time; she needs to read up to the pencil mark she made(and 5 lines ahead because sometimes the answers are 5 or less lines after the lines that were referred to in the questions), not keep reading on.</p>