for the most part, questions on the sat are put in a pretty specific order. with the exception of the passage-based critical reading, each group of questions of the same type is ordered from easiest to hardest.<\/p>\n
so what does that mean for you when you take your sat?<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
there are some of you out there who may be surprised by this. the (mistaken) logic goes something like this: \u201ci should spend my time on the difficult questions while i have less time pressure, because if there\u2019s only a few minutes left i won\u2019t be able answer those.\u201d and while that might give you some points on difficult questions that you might miss otherwise, it ignores the simple and critical fact that the time you spend working on the end of the section comes out of the time you could<\/i> spend knocking out correct answers in the beginning of the section.<\/p>\n
every question in a given section is worth the same<\/i> amount of points in your overall sat score. if you get the answer to question 1 wrong, it hurts you just as much as a wrong answer to question 20.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
if you were picking apples, and you had five minutes to get as many as you could, would you start by getting a ladder and going to the top of the tree? no you wouldn\u2019t, would you. it\u2019s hard to pick apples with one hand, leaning over the top rungs and trying to keep your balance. instead, you\u2019d run around the trunk with one hand in the air and a basket in the other, knocking ripe, low hanging apples into the basket. maybe you wouldn\u2019t get to the ones in the top of the tree, but you\u2019d get a lot of apples, and that\u2019s the point.<\/p>\n