SAT Critical Reading: How to Finish a Section

With so much to read and so many questions to answer, Critical Reading is for many students the most difficult SAT section to finish within the 20-25 minutes allowed.

To finish each Critical Reading section, limit the amount of time you spend on the earlier, shorter questions.

One big reason students have trouble finishing Critical Reading is that they spend too much time on the Sentence Completion and Short Passage Reading questions at the beginning of the section. As a result, students do not leave themselves enough time to complete the Long Passage questions at the end.

Try to spend about:

30-45 seconds on each Sentence Completion question

45-60 seconds on each Short Passage question

This will leave you with well over a minute per Long Passage question, which is enough time to both read the passage(s) and answer all of the questions.

From my SAT training guide: SAT Unlocked.