Section II: Three Essays, 2 Hours 15 Minutes, and the Reading Period

The reading period exists because the synthesis essay hands you six sources you cannot write about cold. Those 15 minutes are the only stretch of the exam built purely for reading, and you are not allowed to write during them. If you spend that time drafting an introduction instead, you have not saved time, you have just moved your source-reading into the two hours meant for writing, shrinking what is left for all three essays.

After the reading period, the clock shifts to two hours for the synthesis, rhetorical analysis, and argument essays together, with no bell separating one from the next. The usual plan is about 40 minutes per essay, but that split is a guideline, not a rule printed on the exam. Nothing stops you from writing the essays in a different order than they appear in the booklet, since each is scored on its own by its own three-row rubric: thesis, evidence and commentary, sophistication. The real danger is not order, it is pacing. If synthesis takes 55 minutes and argument takes 35, rhetorical analysis is left with whatever remains, often closer to 25 minutes, and Row B, the evidence and commentary row that rewards sustained development, is hard to earn when an essay is cut short.

This is why Section II is less about which essay you tackle first and more about protecting three roughly equal blocks of writing time. The reading period and the two-hour window connect directly to the rubric: every essay is scored the same way, so a rushed third essay costs points on the identical scale as a well-timed first one.