Section I: 45 Questions, Five Sets, 60 Minutes

The 60 minutes splits across five sets, not 45 equal slices. Two sets attach to published prose passages, where you answer questions about rhetorical choices, purpose, and effect in someone else's writing. Three sets attach to a student's draft, where you act as an editor, choosing revisions for wording, evidence, organization, and transitions. Reading sits inside the same clock as answering, so every minute spent reading a passage is a minute taken away from that set's questions.

The five sets carry different question counts, usually 13, 12, 8, 8, and 4, and that forces uneven pacing. If you gave each set the same flat number of minutes, the 4-question set would get just as much time as the 13-question set, which wastes time on the small set and starves the large one. The fix is to let time follow the count: more questions in a set means more minutes budgeted for it, with a little extra folded in up front for reading the passage itself.

This pacing logic connects directly to how you should treat passage length. A dense 900-word reading passage takes longer to get through than a breezy 500-word one, even when both carry the same number of questions, so the reading-to-answering ratio shifts without changing how many points are available. Recognizing that early lets you adjust on the fly, spending more of a set's minutes on the page and less time rereading later, instead of discovering with ten minutes left that two sets are still untouched.