The timed protocol

Timed practice differs from practice: the goal is no longer "solve it" but "solve it at exam tempo and recover from misses". Protocol:

1. Set the clock before reading. This course's timed sets assume ~2 minutes per coding challenge (the exam's MCQ tempo). Write the deadline down — an untracked clock is no clock.
2. Predict or skeleton, then decide. At 60 seconds in, you must have either a diagnosis or a plan. If neither: mark, skip, return. Skipping is a scored skill — the digital exam has no wrong-answer penalty, so an eventual guess beats a blank, but a considered answer beats both.
3. The two-pass sweep. First pass: answer everything under 90 seconds of thought. Second pass: the marked leftovers, budget in reverse-order of your confidence.
4. Post-set audit (5 minutes). For each miss: which family (Module 13's taxonomy)? which probe would have caught it? One line in your error log. The audit, not the timer, is where timed practice actually buys points.

The timed sets in this module deliberately MIX topics — arrays, strings, ArrayList, 2D, recursion, classes — without labels, because the exam never tells you which machine to use.