Do Not Try to Determine How Well You’re Doing

You will never know how well you are doing until the test is over. Despite your best intuition, you have absolutely no way of determining whether a question is easy or hard for the purposes of your score. You have no way of knowing how other students did or are doing on that problem. What seems easy to you may be hard for the majority, and what seems hard to you may be easy for the majority.

Furthermore, you’ll be blindly exposed to experimental questions. That is, you won’t know they’re experimental. Perhaps that question that’s worrying you so much won’t even be counted. So why waste your limited energy thinking about things you can’t control? Just focus on doing the absolute best you can.

Similarly, do not try to guess how well you did on a particular section. You may feel like you really bombed the Quant or Verbal section, but you have no real way of knowing. Worse yet, if you get down on yourself because you assume you messed up on the first section, that may negatively affect how you perform on the next section.