Quiz Tools

Single-topic drills

To drill a single topic, open the relevant unit guide, read the four short paragraphs of notes, and then attempt all four practice questions before revealing any explanations. Score yourself out of four. If you score three or four, mark the topic as “maintain” and revisit it once a week. If you score two or fewer, mark the topic as “rebuild” and schedule a return visit within forty-eight hours, this time reading the explanations carefully before re-attempting the questions.

This single-topic drill is the workhorse of weeks 2 and 3 of the study planner. Most students underestimate how much score lift comes from short, focused drilling on a small set of weak topics; the official released-exam data consistently shows that score gains are concentrated in the topics a student deliberately revisited, not the topics they re-read in long study sessions.

Mixed-topic drills

For mixed-topic drilling, open three to five different unit guides in different browser tabs, ideally spanning different units of the same exam. Attempt all the questions across the tabs without grading in between. Then grade them all at once. The goal is to break the habit of recognizing question types by context: on test day, the questions arrive in a random order, and a student who has only ever drilled in single-topic blocks often loses points on the first few questions of a section while their brain re-orients.

Mixed-topic drilling is the workhorse of week 5 of the study planner. Aim for three mixed sessions in week 5, each lasting roughly forty-five minutes.

Timed drills

Timed drilling is more demanding than untimed drilling and should not be the default. Use it once per week from week 3 onward to confirm that your pacing matches the official section timing. The published per-section timings are: SAT Reading and Writing — about 1.2 minutes per question; SAT Math — about 1.6 minutes per question; ACT English — about 36 seconds per question; ACT Math — exactly one minute per question; ACT Reading and Science — about 53 seconds per question. AP exam timings vary by subject; check the official AP Course and Exam Description for the per-question target.

To run a timed drill, set a phone timer for the appropriate number of seconds per question, attempt every question without re-reading, and grade only after the timer ends. The score itself matters less than the gap between your timed score and your untimed score on the same questions: a large gap signals a pacing problem, not a knowledge gap, and should be addressed with shorter, faster reading drills rather than more topic review.

When to switch to released exams

The practice questions on this site are calibrated to be slightly easier than real exam items so that they confirm understanding without discouraging students who are mid-review. Once you can consistently score three or four on most unit guides in your target subject, switch to released exams from the College Board (for the SAT and AP) or ACT, Inc. (for the ACT). Those are the only sources guaranteed to match the difficulty distribution of the actual test, and they ship with the official scoring rubric.