Skill Weighting: Where the Prose Fiction Points Sit

Section I draws from seven skill categories, but they are not equal shares. Character and narration sit at the top, each worth a large slice of the 55 questions, since most passages are mined for how a narrator filters events and how a character is revealed through action, speech, and detail. Structure also pulls real weight, because stems often ask why a passage is arranged the way it is. Setting sits at the bottom of the band. That gap is not an accident. It reflects what prose fiction passages actually give question writers the most material to ask about: a narrator's distance and reliability, a character's motives, and the shape of a scene generate more distinct, answerable questions than a description of place does.

That weighting should drive how a revision hour gets spent. An even split across all seven categories wastes time on the categories that simply cannot return many points, while underfeeding the ones where most of the questions live. But weight is not the only variable: a small category you keep missing is still worth fixing, because those missed questions are real and recoverable, just capped in number. The smart move is to combine the weighting with your own error pattern rather than treat either alone as the full picture.

This sits next to the rest of Section I's structure: five passage sets, function-style stems asking what a choice does rather than just what it means, and four standard ways a wrong answer fails. Knowing the skill weighting tells you where to aim inside that format, the same way knowing the free-response section needs one deeply known novel or play tells you how to build a reading list around the literary argument essay.