The #1 Tool of Effective Time Management
The SAT and ACT are both exams that can prove challenging for students to complete within allotted time constraints. Getting into time trouble can create something of a vicious cycle, as students may find that as they become aware of having less time than they’d like, they then become less able to calmly think and make rational decisions about how to progress in difficult problems. They begin to rush, and their accuracy drops. Sound good to you? Me neither.
It’s worth considering why a student might take longer than ideal to work through a problem:
They may not have a strong understanding of the underlying concepts, or there may just be a useful piece missing.
They may be relying on one method for solving a problem when another method would be more efficient.
And the big one (in my opinion): They may simply be making poor choices about where and how to spend their time on the exam.
A common scenario to encounter on these exams is the case in which we are working on a question and find we are making little to no progress. It might be that we are struggling with understanding a piece of text, or distinguishing between answers. In a standard SAT English module we have 32 minutes to complete 27 questions (an average of about 1 minute, 11 seconds per question), and so we must ask ourselves, “given the time I have at my disposal, will it serve me to continue spending it on this question? Or will I be able to put that time to better use on other questions later down the line?”
My prescription is simple. Skip it. Choose an answer (after all, these are multiple choice questions), flag the question (so you can more easily come back to it later), and move on.
Let me now walk through a kind of game-theoretical analysis of the decision to go ahead and skip this question.
I propose that there are two possible outcomes to this decision, which I will describe as either “I will have time to come back to that question later” or “I won’t.” Is that a fair description of the possible outcomes? I think it is.
Let’s take the first outcome. “I will have time to come back to the question later”. Well then… there’s really no issue, is there? I don’t do the question now, but I can do it later. After all, we don’t get any bonus points for doing the questions in order. We can do them back to front if we like. We can skip an entire section of questions without even looking at them and come back later (a very reasonable strategy in certain circumstances). So, the first outcome of this decision seems to me to be just dandy, and we are justified in having chosen to skip.
Now the second outcome. “I won’t (have time to come back to this question later)”. What do you think of that? What implication does that have for our decision to have skipped that question in the first place? I’ll tell you what I think.
I think that:
If you skip a question because you’re prioritising your time and you feel you’re not making progress on that question, AND THEN you don’t have time to come back to that question,
then I think it was probably a very, very good decision you made to skip ahead.
After all, we made that decision because we thought we might need the time somewhere else, and it turns out we were right. There were probably several questions after that one in the test, and we have correctly prioritised our performance across the whole test section, as opposed to our performance on that one troublesome question.
This is a decision making process that I often see ambitious, high-achieving students struggle to put into practice. Students who take a perfectionist approach to their exam work may be extremely unwilling to skip over or set aside problems because they feel like they must try to get every question right, and skipping a question is some kind of forfeit. However, I must take issue with the goal of trying to get every question right. If our overarching aim is to maximise the student’s scores on their standardised exam, then a much more appropriate way to conceive of our goal in taking the test is not to get every question right, but rather to get as many questions right as possible within the allotted time. It is that last piece of the statement that they may be ignoring when they take the perfectionist approach. If a student stubbornly refuses to move on, and drives down deeper to try to force a solution on an unwilling problem, they may well find that the allotted time begins to work against them in a serious way. They then rush to make up time afterwards, the overall quality of their work declines, and they underperform as a result.
Fortunately, with a bit of encouragement and explanation, most students end up being willing at least to try this in spite of any initial skepticism, and the results are strongly reinforcing.