The Gift of Extra Time on the ACT® and SAT®: How to Spend It Wisely

Extra time on the ACT® and SAT® is quite a precious commodity. Whether your client has qualified for extended time or they’ve paced themselves well enough that they’ve finished a section early, they must be prepared to utilize all of their testing time wisely. Every second counts.

Long Before Test Day …

From the very start of your client’s test prep, you’ve been working toward preparing for the big test day. You’ve been helping them improve in their academics, learn to stay focused during their tutoring sessions and practice tests, and train to endure the duration of an actual test. 

During their test-prep journey, you’ve pinpointed their strengths and weaknesses, and should be able to foresee what parts of the actual test will be more challenging for your client.

By the time test day rolls around, your client should have already become familiar with the testing format, the subjects covered on each section, the question types they’ll encounter, and the tools required on test day (e.g., their testing calculator).

By test day, your client should have had enough rehearsals taking real practice tests to be comfortable with every general aspect of the test.

Testing Strategies

Different strokes for different folks. There are plenty of strategies that you’ve offered your client throughout their test prep; some have worked, others you’ve scrapped. 

Before test day, your client should be well trained on how to approach every subject on the test, and should have had plenty of practice grappling with the various question types. They should have a wide array of tools in their toolbox to choose from.

Check out some of our previous posts on some solid testing strategies for students:

• How to Take On Those Puzzling Rhetoric Questions on the ACT® & SAT®

• Punctuation: How to Crush These Question Types on the ACT® & SAT®

• The 3 Trickiest ACT® Punctuation Rules All Students Need to Know

• Inference Questions Got You Stumped? Here's The Best Way to Handle Them

• Logical Transitions: How to Choose the Best Answers to These Questions Types on the ACT® & SAT®

• Best Ways to Unwrap Tone and Attitude Questions on the ACT® & SAT®

• How to Answer Author's Voice & Method Questions on the ACT® & SAT®

• How to Approach Main Idea Questions on the ACT® & SAT®

• The 3 Types of SAT® Reading Passages and How to Prepare for Each of Them

• 5 Tips for Improving a Student’s Speed on the ACT® Math Test

• Preparing Students for the Format of the ACT® Mathematics Test

• How to Help Students Interpret Data on the ACT® Science Test

• 3 Simple Ways to Help Students Save Time on the ACT® and SAT

The Gift of Extra Time: How to Spend it Wisely

We’ve compiled some tried-and-true strategies to share with your students to help them maximize any additional testing time they may find to help them get the most out of test day.

General Tips:

• Go back to any marked or flagged questions. Students have the option of noting any questions they’ve found challenging or confusing as they work their way through a section. Any extra time should be spent going back to those questions.

• Find and fix “silly mistakes.” It happens—especially when students are fresh out the gate and trying to rip through the test and stay on pace—they overlook details and make content and/or procedural mistakes. If they’ve got the time, they can go back, spot these “oops!” and fix them.

• Avoid overthinking questions you do not fully understand. Test takers may not fully understand every question, even with additional time to try to puzzle them out. That’s okay. Just like their first go-round, test takers want to make sure that they don’t spend too much time on just one question if there are several they have flagged to check.

  How much time they spend on each question really depends on the question’s level of difficulty for them. A good rule of thumb is to prioritize questions that contain familiar content. Test day is not the opportune time to try to teach yourself a new concept. If there’s extra time and your student is confident they’ve gotten all the low-hanging fruit, go for it; otherwise, they need to put their time into the places most likely to result in points.

Reading, Writing, English Language Tips:

• Reread complex and confusing passages. While test takers want to try to use about the same amount of time for each passage, there are bound to be a few passages that are more challenging. Understanding the passage is essential to answering the relative questions. 

• Double check what the questions are asking. Students want to be sure that they comprehend the question being asked well enough to be able to validate their answer, prove their answer correct, and/or find evidence to support their answer choice. 

• Double check what the answers are stating. Break down the answer choices. How are they different from one another? Identify the differences between the answer choices. Pay attention to the differences between punctuation, syntax, and grammar. Which choice provides the best answer to the question?

Math and Science Tips:

• If they have to guess, guess on the multiple-choice questions. Especially for math, if test takers need to guess on a question, they have better odds of guessing on a multiple choice question than guessing on a fill-in question. A 1 in 4 chance is better than a 1 in infinity chance! Usually there are only two viable answers, so weeding out the outliers can easily up the odds to 50/50.

• Show work. If students had to blow by a question they were unsure of and were unable to show work for, taking the time to write out their solution will help them confirm their answer choice or find the better answer. It’s always easier to look over answer choices more thoroughly when they’ve written out the problems and organized their thoughts on paper rather than trying to do it all in their heads.

  To this end, reinforce organizing scratch paper during the math section. Numbering and boxing the work for each question will make it easier to refer back if there is time to recheck.

• Plug in answers. If they’ve got the time, test takers should test their answers by plugging their answer choice into the math problem to make sure that those solutions actually work.

• Double check the data. Graphs, charts, tables—test takers with extra time need to be sure that they’ve understood the data provided so that they’ve answered the relative questions correctly. 

Think your client is ready for test day? Check out our 7 Essential Reminders for Students to Cross Off Their Test Day Checklist and be sure to download our free Ebook: Illustrated Test Day Checklist for ACT® & SAT® Students.

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