Time Management is Key: Strategies to Pace Yourself on the Hour-Long CPS HSAT
On the High School Admissions Test, what you know is only half the battle. The other half is how quickly and efficiently you can apply that knowledge. With approximately 60 minutes to tackle two challenging sections, the clock is one of your biggest opponents. A poor pacing strategy can cause you to rush, make careless errors, or worse—run out of time before you get to questions you knew how to answer.
A great time management strategy is a skill, and like any skill, it can be learned and perfected. These techniques will help you make the clock your ally, not your enemy.
Know Your Battlefield: Understanding the Pace
The HSAT is roughly 60 minutes long, split between a Reading section and a Math section. Each section has approximately 30 questions. This gives you, on average, just about one minute per question.
That’s not a lot of time. Some questions will take less than a minute, while others will require more. The goal is to "bank" time on the easier questions so you can "spend" it on the more difficult ones. This is where a clear strategy becomes essential.
The Two-Pass Strategy: Your Golden Rule for Pacing
This is one of the most powerful strategies for any standardized test. Instead of working through the test from beginning to end, you tackle it in two distinct passes.
Pass 1: The "Easy Points" Pass. On your first sweep through a section, you answer every single question that you know how to do immediately. If a question makes you pause, seems confusing, or looks like it will require multiple complex steps, you immediately circle it in your test booklet and move on. The goal of this pass is to lock in all the points you are sure about without getting bogged down.
Pass 2: The "Problem-Solving" Pass. After you’ve gone through the whole section once, you go back to the beginning and work through only the questions you circled. Now you are using the remaining time to tackle the harder problems without the risk of leaving easy questions at the end unanswered.
How to Practice Your Pacing
You can't learn time management by just reading about it; you have to feel it. This is why our advice on why Practice Makes Perfect is so crucial. The only way to master the Two-Pass strategy and develop an internal clock is through repetition.
Every time you take a full-length, timed CPS HSAT Practice Test, you are rehearsing your time management skills. You will learn valuable information, such as:
Reading Section Pacing: Are you spending too much time reading the passages and not enough time answering questions? Practice our active reading strategies to become more efficient.
Math Section Pacing: Are you getting stuck on certain types of problems? Practice will train you to recognize a time-sink problem and save it for your second pass, as we discuss in our math strategies guide.
By making time management a focus of your practice sessions, the real test will feel like a familiar routine. You'll be in control of the clock, not the other way around, giving you the best possible chance to maximize your score on the 900-Point Matrix.