You open a practice test and promise yourself you will stay calm this time. Two passages in, your pencil starts bouncing, your eyes dart back and forth across the text, and the clock becomes louder than the words. You feel confident about a few questions, but others pull you into the weeds. You chase a tricky inference, then a vocabulary choice that looks right but feels off, then a paired evidence question that points you to lines that seem almost correct but not quite. When you tally your score, you are stuck at the same plateau you hit last month. The result is more frustration than clarity. You can sense that the points are within reach, but you do not have a reliable way to get them on purpose.