Exam strategy for three unseen texts

Time management and answer discipline matter as much as the close-reading skill itself.

How to spend the exam

Roughly 25 minutes per text, with time left to check.
Answer EVERY part of every question — a blank part scores zero, a rough attempt scores something.
The final part of each question is usually where the Excellence marks sit — never skip it to save time elsewhere.
Reset fully between texts — a weak Question One does not cap what Question Two or Three can achieve.

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A brief plan before writing pays off even under time pressure

Spending even 60-90 seconds jotting the specific idea the question names, and two or three features you have already spotted in the text, before writing a single sentence, prevents the common failure of writing a page of description and only realising near the end what the actual argument should have been. This small investment of time is recovered many times over in a more focused, better-structured answer.

Weaving evidence quickly under exam time pressure

Practising the quote-weaving method until it is automatic matters even more here than for a prepared essay, since there is no time to draft and redraft a sentence under exam conditions.
A slightly less elegant but correctly-woven quotation, written fast, beats a beautifully worded but unanalysed one.

Practice for this standard covers the whole topic — flashcards and quiz.