As discussed earlier, you should try to avoid getting bogged down, and you don’t have to answer questions in numerical order. In fact, in some situations it can be a good idea to skip an occasional question. Think about it: every question on the SAT is worth the same number of raw points, so what matters most on the test is answering as many questions correctly as possible. If skipping a question that’s giving you trouble allows you the time to answer three other questions, then it’s a good bargain.

How many questions you should skip depends entirely on your target score. If you have a target score of 1400 or higher, you need to answer every question, so there isn’t much of a reason to skip around. But if, for example, your target score is an 1100, you can afford to skip 2–3 questions in every group. In this case, if you encounter a sentence completion you just can’t answer, don’t spend a ton of time trying to figure it out. Skip it and move on to the next. If the sentence completions you find difficult happen to be the last one or two in the group, don’t worry about leaving them behind, and move on to the analogies.

Please note that we are not suggesting that you skip all the questions in a group as soon as you hit one that you find difficult. Don’t just assume that all questions appearing after a question that you find hard will be too hard for you. Sometimes, for whatever reason, a question will be hard for you even if the question after it is easy. The location of a question is a clue about its difficulty, but you shouldn’t let the test dictate what you can and cannot answer simply based on its location. If you have a sense of how difficult a question probably is, and a similar sense of how many questions you can afford to skip, you should be able to make an informed decision about whether to skip a question or not. But make sure that your decision is informed: at least try to glance at every question in a group to see if you might be able to answer it.