Reading Questions First

[Cking14]

A few times, I have gotten so frustrated on this section, that I gave up and started skimming some of the questions first to get the gist of what I should be looking for. Sometimes this works, other times it doesn't. Is there ANY situation in which it might benefit me to skim (not necessarily fully read) the questions first? My score seems to be holding within 5 points average, but the score is so low. It is so frustrating for me, as this will be the 4th time taking the test - and my last because I can't do this forever. Help please!!

[Dave Killoran]

Hi C,

Thanks for the questions! Everyone is different, and while the methods we teach work the best for the large majority of people, I think there can be times where it can be in someone's interest to switch it up a bit. For example, I'm currently working with a student who has a really strong aversion to anything science-based (both in RC and LR). For her, we've developed a strategy where when she sees that the topic is science, she immediately goes and looks at the question stems. Since she knows the topic will "freeze" her to some extent, her goal is to simply try to match information in the passage with specific questions/answers. This has allowed her to go from none right on science passages to about half right, and frequently even more.

One of my long-standing contentions is that you should try the approaches we advocate first, and really put 100% into learning them. But, if time and practice show you that it's not working the way you want, then feel free to adjust your approach to what works best for you. In your case, it may mean that if you start reading a passage and it doesn't click, maybe scanning the questions stems will help everything fall into place. That would provably be worth the extra time spent looking at those questions stems, and I see nothing wrong with it.

Please let me know if that helps. Thanks!

[Cking14]

I'm definitely going to give it a try again. We'll see what happens. RC, because of my slow reading, is not my best section. Thanks!