Improving RC timing with accuracy

Hi desertEagle,

I’ve been through the trouble and I know how it feels. There is one fundamental mistake that most students do, that is trying to read the passage fast. The trick to ace RC is not to understand WHAT is written, but to understand WHY it is written. Let me take you through the 3 step process that helped me master RC.

STEP 1: INVOLVED READING

While reading the passage, focus on the role played by each sentence and understand what purpose does it serve? Simple questions that you can ask could be - does it support an argument, weaken it, oppose a viewpoint, provide more data, or bring in a different perspective and so on. The idea is to understand the transition in thoughts and which side is the author taking.

STEP 2: EVOLVED READING

Once you’ve understood the intent of each line, you can then choose to ignore the detail and focus on summarising the paragraphs in a line. Then, focus on the intent of each para and think about the structure of the passage. I even believe in identifying (at a high level) what is the main point of the passage even if there is no main point question attached. It helps in having more confidence in marking Inference or Organization based questions.

STEP 3: ANSWER CHOICE ELIMINATION

If the above two steps are done properly, this step is the easiest. All you need to do is, look at each question one-by-one and eliminate the answer choices from your evolved understanding of the passage. Involved and Evolved Reading will help you eliminate 4 choices in most of the questions. In few tough ones, you might be confused between 2 choices, but those can be easily eliminated by focusing on the following aspects:

1.Scope of the choice – shouldn’t be out of scope or too limited in scope
2.Minute details – shouldn’t have half-truths and rest distortion
3. Confusing words – shouldn’t have words which seem similar but are different.
4. Opposite – is opposite of what you should be looking for

These 3 steps are simple and you need to ensure that you practice using this method and perfect it to get high accuracy.

IT’S TIME CONSUMING – ISN’T IT?

Ok, this is one argument, which I hear several times and the only thing that I’ve to say is “Yes it is time-consuming but not more than what GMAT provides you with”. Even if you spend 3-4 mins in Step 1, 30 secs on Step 2 and 1 min each on answering the 4 questions, you still complete 4 questions in 8-9 mins, which to me is good enough. Now, the tricky thing is to complete Step 1 in 3-4 mins, you should keep the time pressure out of your mind and give the passage its due time. Initially you might spend even 8-9 mins doing Step 1 alone, but that’s ok. That’s how we human beings learn a new skill. Moreover, you’re not writing GMAT tomorrow, so spend time today and keep following the method. Once you solve around 40 passages using this approach, you will find time per passage optimizing.

IS THIS IS THE ONLY METHOD?

At least for me – someone who hasn’t been a Bibliophile – this method worked well. Shortcuts such as reading first few lines or the question first work for students who are already at a pretty good level, not for those who are struggling. So, I would highly recommend using this methodology.

You can go through the links below to understand the process in a better way:

Hope this helped and feel free to contact if you have any further queries.

You can always write back to me here or the better way would be to connect over a call and have a discussion. You can schedule a free consultation call using the below link.