Ack too little time in verbal

[jordan19]

Ah... I am finding that I have too little time in verbal. I'm scoring like a 6-9 in this section when I'm timed... eekk!

But when I go through the passage slower so that I can understand, the questions aren't bad at all! In fact I am getting most if not all right.... Does anybody know how I can speed up my comprehension of the passage?

[dmleo]

There is really no secret to reading fast or faster, but there are tips that might help you focus better on the passages.

1.Use highlighter to shade in words or phrases that seem important to you as you read. Its also easier to refer to them later cuz they stand out in yellow!

2.spend 15~20 seconds on reading the questions first before you start the passage and look for quotations and keep them in mind once you start reading. This helps you save time later trying to remember where the hell that quotation was in the passage.

3. For questions that ask, "what is the main point", the answers are usually in the first or the very last paragraph so focus on those if you are stuck.

4. Don't try to skip any parts of the passage, but read them as fast and as carefully as you can since any information in the passage can have the answer to the question

[Prion]

The fastest way to speed up your verbal would be to try to limit the frequency of referring back to the passage. You'd be surprised how much of a time waster that is.

 

I know there's a strong urge of doing it because, frankly, not all of us have photographic memory and can perfectly comprehend the passage on a single read. Trust your main ideas (I'm stealing the strategy from ExamKracker here), and use it to help you to answer the questions without knowing all the details that it asks.

 

Give it a try and see if your timing improves and that if your score are at least not dropping. Then you can allow yourself to go back more and perhaps your score would then increase.

[dmleo]

also you gotta have the right mentality as if there is fuc*ing nothing in the world right now except you and that passage. You gotta put in 120% focus and concentration into the passages and just rip it apart.

[astrogirl]

If you've still got a lot of time left before the MCAT, just try to increase your speed gradually. Time yourself, but don't give yourself a time limit. Just figure out how long it takes you to get through the whole thing. Then try to get it done in 5 minutes less. And keep decreasing the time until you can get through it in the allowed time. Some people find that they do better if they work really hard on all but one passage and then just guess on the last one, so you can experiment with that and see what it does to your score. Also, I found that if I read the questions quickly before I started reading the passage, that helped me to focus my reading and do better, so that's another thing you can try.