Time pressure can bring out your worst instincts as an SAT test-taker. After all, how often on a high school English or Math test do you have one minute or less to answer a question?
Learn how to budget your time on each section of the SAT , and get the pacing tips you need for the score of your dreams.
How Long Does the SAT Take?
The SAT clocks in at 3 hours (3 hours and 15 minutes with breaks). And if you choose to sign up for the optional essay , the SAT takes 3 hours and 50 minutes to complete (or 4 hours, 5 minutes with breaks).
SAT Test Length by Section
How are those 3 hours broken up by section? Here’s what your SAT test day schedule looks like:
Are you ready for your SAT date ? The biggest mistake many test-takers make is to spend too little time on the easy and medium questions, and too much time on the hard ones. The problem with this approach is that if you rush through the easy and medium questions, you are almost certain to make a few careless mistakes. Here are the pacing steps that will help you improve your score.
1. 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!
2. Mimic the Real Thing
When you take practice tests, time yourself exactly as you will be timed on the real SAT. Develop a sense of how long 35 minutes is, for example, and how much time you can afford to spend on cracking difficult problems. If you know ahead of time what to expect, you won’t be as nervous.
Don’t let yourself get trapped by hard or time-consuming questions. Stop the part of your brain that says, “But I’ve already spent so much time working on this question . . . I know I can finish it!” If you’re stumped or running short on time, guess and move on. Learn more SAT tips for completing questions out of order.
Give yourself eight minutes per passage to help you keep track of time! If you maintain this pace, you'll get through the entire test with five minutes to spare. This means, read the 1st question, and then look for the answer in the passage. Look at the 2nd question, and then look for the answer in the passage, etc.
Here are a few factors that make the SAT a difficult test for many students. These include time pressure, challenging math concepts, difficult reading passages, and a high-stress environment.
An SAT score of 1100 can be seen as satisfactory, but it's not exceptional. In 2021, out of all high school graduates who took the 2023 SAT during high school, the average SAT score was 1028. Any score above that is considered acceptable for many colleges.
He had many choices of colleges to study further, but he opted out of all options because his sole interest was to become a rapper. Aside from Will, the only two well-known celebrities to have received a perfect 1600 on the SATs are Microsoft's Paul Allen and Facebook's Mark Zuckerburg.
The most important thing you can do to build stamina for your SAT or ACT is to take practice tests. Nothing else gives you the same preparation for what “race day” will feel like. It's important to take a practice test at the beginning of prep, as well as once or twice during the (ideally) two to four months of study.
Maybe you need to spend more time on your writing skills or work with a tutor to get a handle on difficult math concepts. Academic topics aren't the only SAT weakness you may have. You probably need to improve your test-taking skills. For example, you must have excellent time management to test well.
Time yourself while you're completing practice tests using Official SAT Practice to make sure you experience real test day conditions. You can go to sat.org/practice-proctor for a timed experience on demand. Admission tests are strictly timed, and their timing is different from regular high school tests.
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