Working a Short Passage in 71 Seconds

The math is simple: a module hands you roughly 32 minutes for 27 questions, which works out to about 71 seconds each. That number isn't a stopwatch rule for every single question. It's a budget. Some questions, especially short ones with a clean main idea, take 40 seconds. Others, especially dense inference questions, eat 90 seconds or more. The skill works because questions inside each skill group tend to run easiest to hardest, so the early ones in a group are where you bank time, and the later ones are where you spend it.

A workable split on a short passage: spend about 20-25 seconds reading the roughly 100-word text, 10-15 seconds reading the stem so you know exactly what's being asked, and the rest eliminating choices, since cutting three wrong answers is usually faster than spotting the one right one. When a question still won't resolve, mark it and move on rather than protecting a single point at the cost of several easier ones later in the module.

This pacing skill sits right under the content skills of the unit, central ideas, evidence, and inference, because none of that reasoning matters if the clock runs out before you reach it. It also connects to the test's adaptive structure: the first module's accuracy, not its speed, determines whether the second module is the harder, higher-ceiling version or the easier one. Rushing to finish early with sloppy answers can route you to a lower-ceiling module, which caps your score regardless of how fast you worked.