You should observe the following rules in every section of the SAT. Essentially, they are just common sense guidelines, but if you follow them, you will save time and cut down on careless errors.

The SAT is a timed test, and you will definitely need every second. Don’t waste time reading the instructions. Make sure you know the instructions so that you don’t even have to glance at them on test day.

Some students feel as though they must keep their test booklets clean and pretty. There’s no truth to that. When you finish with your test booklet, it just gets thrown away. Plus, writing on your test booklet can benefit you. If you need to write down a sentence or an equation to help you think through a problem, why not do it right next to the question? If you come to a question you want to skip and come back to later, mark it. (Do not make unnecessary marks on your answer sheet—it is definitely not scratch paper!)

All questions are worth the same number of points regardless of difficulty, so it makes sense to answer the questions you find easy and less time-consuming first and the more difficult questions later. This way you’ll be sure to accumulate as many points as possible. The structure of the test helps you to identify easy and difficult questions, as is explained in the “Order of Difficulty” section. And remember, you can skip around within a timed section. If you wanted to, you could answer all the easy sentence completions in a 30-minute verbal section, then skip over to the easy analogies, then go back to the moderate sentence completions, and so on.

While taking seven minutes to solve a particularly difficult question may feel like a moral victory, it’s quite possible that you could have used that same time to answer three other questions. Do not be scared to skip a question if it’s giving you a lot of trouble—you can come back to it if you have time at the end.

We will cover the specific strategies for guessing later.

There are two types of carelessness, and both will cost you points. The first type of carelessness results from moving too fast. In speeding through the test, you make yourself vulnerable to misinterpreting the question, failing to see that the question contains some subtlety or extra nuance, overlooking one of the answer choices, or simply making a mathematical or logical mistake. So don’t speed through the test. Make sure that you are moving quickly, but not so quickly that you become reckless.

The second type of carelessness results from lack of confidence. Do not simply assume out of frustration that you will not be able to answer a question without even looking at it. You should at least glance at every question to see if it’s something you can answer. Skipping a question you could have answered is almost as bad as answering incorrectly a question you should have gotten right.

The scoring computer is unintelligent and unmerciful. If you answered a question correctly, but somehow made a mistake in marking your answer grid, the computer will mark that question wrong. If, somehow, you skipped question 5, but put the answer to question 6 in row 5, and the answer to question 7 in row 6, and so on, thereby throwing off your answers for an entire section . . . well, that would not be good.

Be very careful when filling out your answer grid. Many people will tell you many different ways that are the “best” way to fill out the sheet. We don’t care how you do it as long as you’re careful. We will give one piece of advice: talk to yourself. As you fill in the answer sheet, say to yourself: “number 23, B; number 24, E; number 25, A.” Seriously. Talking to yourself will force you to look at the details and will increase your accuracy.