"I know the material, I just run out of time." Tutors hear this constantly, and students almost always draw the wrong conclusion from it. They think they have a speed problem, so they practice rushing. Rushing produces careless errors, the errors cost more points than the timing did, and the score goes nowhere.
Here is what is actually going on, and how timing really gets fixed.
Timing Is a Recognition Problem
The single most important thing to understand: practice is what fixes timing. Not pacing tricks, not rushing. When you have done enough practice, problems just jump out at you. You read a question and recognize it, because you have seen its cousins twenty times. Recognition is instant; deriving an approach from scratch takes two minutes. The student who "runs out of time" is usually spending those two minutes on problem types a well-practiced student dispatches in twenty seconds.
That is why the students with the best timing never practiced speed at all. They practiced volume, and speed showed up on its own. The SAT draws from a finite set of question types; familiarity with all of them IS the pacing strategy.
Where the Time Actually Goes
Module 1 should feel mostly obvious. It is built from easy and medium questions, and if you have practiced properly you should move through it quickly with time to spare for its few hard ones at the end. If Module 1 itself feels slow, that is your signal: the foundation needs more reps before any timing strategy will matter.
The harder Module 2 is a different animal. The truly hard material concentrates toward the end of that module, and those final several questions are where students get bogged down. One stubborn problem eats four minutes, panic sets in, and three solvable questions at the end get rushed or never reached. The hard problem cost you one point. The panic cost you three.
The Flashbulb Rule
Here is the advice I give students for those late hard questions. When you read a hard problem, one of two things happens. Either you get the flashbulb moment, you know what you are going to try, or you do not.
If the flashbulb comes, work the problem. If it does not, mark it, skip it, and come back later if you have time. Do not sit there staring. If the approach did not come from reading the problem carefully once, staring at it will not be fruitful, and the two minutes you spend proving that are two minutes stolen from questions you can definitely solve. The flagging tool exists for exactly this. Coming back later with a reset brain genuinely does produce the flashbulb on a second look surprisingly often.
Two where recognition is the whole question. If you see the setup, each one is under thirty seconds.