Slow Down to Go Faster
High-stakes timed tests like the SAT and ACT are inherently stressful experiences, and reducing stress is a primary goal. A chief driver of this stress is time pressure. Paradoxically, sometimes the best thing one can do to improve speed on timed tests is to do untimed practice. In untimed testing, students take all the time they need to fully understand questions and find correct answers. Without the pressure of the clock, it's much easier to master various question types and discover the best ways to find right answers most quickly and easily. It's also ironic that getting stuck on super-hard questions during untimed practice is actually a good thing. By spending way too much time on impossibly difficult questions, students learn to quickly recognize "nightmare questions" they can't answer and just going to waste their time on test day (the strategy: eliminate, guess, move on). After gaining everything possible from untimed testing, students then return to timed...