{"id":15959,"date":"2019-12-05T11:59:06","date_gmt":"2019-12-05T16:59:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kaptest.com\/blog\/prep\/?p=15959"},"modified":"2020-09-11T20:40:17","modified_gmt":"2020-09-11T20:40:17","slug":"pick-b-for-boris-sat-reading-comprehension-timing-tips","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wpapp.kaptest.com\/study\/sat\/pick-b-for-boris-sat-reading-comprehension-timing-tips\/","title":{"rendered":"SAT Reading Comprehension Timing Tips"},"content":{"rendered":"

When I ask my students what they find challenging about reading comprehension, the most popular answer is always the same\u2014\u201ctiming.\u201d (Runners-up include \u201cunderstanding the passage\u201d and \u201cgetting bored.\u201d) Beating the clock on the ACT or SAT reading comprehension test isn\u2019t as hard as most people think it is, and it doesn\u2019t entail what most people think it does.
\nHere are a few basic (and not-so-basic!) tips to help you come to terms with and conquer the timing limitations of the ACT and SAT reading tests.
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SAT Reading Comprehension Timing Tip #1: Don\u2019t complain about the clock<\/h3>
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\nMost of your competition devotes a significant amount of mental energy to whining about the parameters of the test. \u201cIt\u2019s not fair how little time they give us!\u201d \u201cI could ace the test if only I had as much time as I wanted!\u201d As I explained in last week\u2019s post about\u00a0scaled scoring<\/a>, having more time wouldn\u2019t actually raise your score. If the reading comprehension test were ten minutes longer, you\u00a0and everybody else<\/i>\u00a0would get more questions right; and because the test is scaled, nobody\u2019s score would change.
\nSo instead of complaining about the time you don\u2019t have, learn how to make the most of the time you do have. Moaning about the test won\u2019t raise your score, but learning how to be more efficient and more accurate than your competition certainly will.
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SAT Reading Comprehension Timing Tip #2: Embrace your reading speed<\/h3>
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\nNearly all of my students feel subconscious about their reading speed. I sympathize: when you run out of time on a test, it\u2019s natural to think you would have finished if you\u2019d only read faster. Heck, I felt this way myself when I ran out of time on reading tests, and it wasn\u2019t until I became a Kaplan teacher that I realized\u2014to my astonishment\u2014that this natural conclusion is completely wrong.
\nThink about the time you spend reading the passage. Then think about the time you lose because you zoned out and had to re-read a whole paragraph. Or the time you lose playing ping-pong between two answer choices because you don\u2019t understand the passage well enough to see why one of them is wrong. Or the time you lose bashing your head against an impossible question that you should have just skipped.
\nAt the end of the day, your reading speed is not the reason you get questions wrong. Mistakes occur because of lapses in strategy or comprehension or both. If you read faster, you\u2019ll make all the same mistakes\u2014you\u2019ll just make them faster.
\nSo embrace your reading speed. If you can read each passage one time, the first time, and grasp it well enough to confidently answer questions, then you\u2019ll be way ahead compared to someone who reads twice as fast as you do but zones out, misses the key points of the passage, and trips over every trap in the answer choices.
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SAT Reading Comprehension Timing Tip #3: Skip the impossible questions<\/h3>
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\nBy the time most students realize that it\u2019s time to give up on a question, they\u2019ve already spent too much time on it. Say you spend a minute puzzling over a ridiculous question, and say that happens four times. In those four minutes you could have read and annotated an entire passage!
\nI know from personal experience that skipping questions is much easier said than done. I used to get into an ego battle with every test I took and could never bring myself to skip questions. But while skipping questions is easier to say than to do, it CAN be done, and I did eventually develop the ability to do it. When you take practice tests, make a conscious effort to abandon questions at the earliest of sign of a roadblock. It\u2019s much better to skip the hardest 2-3 questions of each passage (but get to all the passages) than to skip an entire passage and miss out on all of its easy questions.
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SAT Reading Comprehension Timing Tip #4: Annotate the reading comprehension passage<\/h3>
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\nNote-taking on a reading comprehension test is tricky business. Many students don\u2019t want to take notes because they\u2019re struggling with time and can\u2019t imagine doing anything that would cut into their time bank even further. On the other hand, many students who do take notes don\u2019t do it the right way, so their decision\u00a0does<\/i>\u00a0end up being a waste of time!
\nThe key when taking notes during the reading comprehension section is to\u00a0annotate<\/i>\u00a0the passage rather than\u00a0summarizing<\/i>\u00a0it. For example, if you read a passage about pandas, your notes for each paragraph might be something like this:
\nP1: Pandas, background
\nP2: Diet
\nP3: Mating habits
\nP4: Endangered
\nNotice that these notes don\u2019t tell you much of anything about pandas. But if I get a question about panda food, I immediately know to go paragraph two to look it up. And if I\u00a0don\u2019t<\/i>\u00a0get any questions about panda food, then thank goodness I didn\u2019t waste gobs of time summarizing all the factual information from the second paragraph!
\nWhen you read a passage on the ACT or SAT, don\u2019t try to process all of the information. This is what causes fatigue, boredom, and zoning out. Instead, try to understand the broad strokes of the passage: why the author wrote it, what the author\u2019s main idea is, and what direction the passage takes. Imagine you\u2019re the author\u2019s editor and he or she is pitching the project to you.
\n\u201cWhat do you want to write about, Author?\u201d
\n\u201cPandas.\u201d
\n\u201cOkay. And what about pandas do you want to write about?\u201d
\n\u201cTheir diet, their mating habits, and how endangered they are.\u201d
\nMaking annotations helps you stay awake while you read and not get burned out by the reams of facts and dense language. When you get to the questions, the notes you made will help you find the useful information more quickly.<\/p>\n

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