Implementing Verbal strategies under timed conditions

[The Brown Knight]

Hi,
In my last 4 TPR practice tests, I've had 7's in all for verbal. I've read the verbal strategies from TPR, Kaplan, EK, and a few more from successful VR scorers here on SDN, and when I practice them without the timing pressure I can implement them fairly well. Heck, I can do fairly well with my own strategy when not under timing pressure. But as soon as I time myself with a set of passages, I end up going over 9 minutes and still miss quite a few. My biggest question is: how is everyone on SDN able to finish passages in 7-8 minutes even if they follow a "slow and careful" reading approach and still miss no more than 1-2 per passage??
For MOST passages, I do understand what's being said. Do you guys read the passage all at once without stopping in between, and at the end articulate the main idea?

Can you suggest changes to my reading strategy?: I generally need to pause momentarily after each claim to summarize the claim and then identify and glide through the evidence/support; if I read without these pauses I would have a significantly more terrible understanding of the passage. The other problem with this strategy is that it falls apart if the passage is a bit unconventional and/or has a large number of claims. I'm really desperate for a 10-11, and your input is highly appreciated.
Also, with how much certainty are you able to answer the questions; I find myself pretty much guessing on over half of them.

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[IslandStyle808]

How often do you look back? If you use the "slow and steady" approach, looking back has to be kept to a minimum.

 

[neekzg]

By "claim" do you mean all the individual claims made in the passage or just the ones referenced in the questions? It would take way too long to try to summarize all the points the author is making as you read the passage--many of them simply aren't going to end up being important to answering the questions. And as said, if you're going to go through that effort of summarizing claims as you read, there's no way you'll have enough time to go back to the passage for every question.

As to your second point, I would say I answer most of the questions with a great degree of confidence. It's critical to build an intuition to immediately eliminate answer choices whenever you can. There are many reasons that an answer choice should be eliminated right off the bat: complete and obvious irrelevance to the passage, verbatim quotes used in incorrect context, use of extremes (which is not limited to including the words "always" or "never" but can be something like "___ has nothing to do with"), etc. [[Of course, there are some exceptions where quotes taken verbatim from the text are actually correct or warranted use of extremes, but you should always be cautious with these]

Once you do a quick process of elimination, you'll need to make a judgment call as to whether the answer choice you are picking is CLEARLY supported by the passage and is in correct alignment with both the author's argument and overall tone.

Have you taken any AAMC FLs? Honestly, AAMC answer choices are usually easier for me to clearly eliminate the wrong ones. I'm almost sure TPR has harder passages/questions although I scored the same on the only TPR test I took as I am on my FLs)

 

[The Brown Knight]

How often do you look back? If you use the "slow and steady" approach, looking back has to be kept to a minimum.

Thanks for the reply. I agree I have been working on minimizing the looking back, but there's always some detail questions that do require returning to the passage no matter how well you understand the passage.

 

[The Brown Knight]

By "claim" do you mean all the individual claims made in the passage or just the ones referenced in the questions? It would take way too long to try to summarize all the points the author is making as you read the passage--many of them simply aren't going to end up being important to answering the questions. And as said, if you're going to go through that effort of summarizing claims as you read, there's no way you'll have enough time to go back to the passage for every question.

As to your second point, I would say I answer most of the questions with a great degree of confidence. It's critical to build an intuition to immediately eliminate answer choices whenever you can. There are many reasons that an answer choice should be eliminated right off the bat: complete and obvious irrelevance to the passage, verbatim quotes used in incorrect context, use of extremes (which is not limited to including the words "always" or "never" but can be something like "___ has nothing to do with"), etc. [[Of course, there are some exceptions where quotes taken verbatim from the text are actually correct or warranted use of extremes, but you should always be cautious with these]

Once you do a quick process of elimination, you'll need to make a judgment call as to whether the answer choice you are picking is CLEARLY supported by the passage and is in correct alignment with both the author's argument and overall tone.

Have you taken any AAMC FLs? Honestly, AAMC answer choices are usually easier for me to clearly eliminate the wrong ones. I'm almost sure TPR has harder passages/questions although I scored the same on the only TPR test I took as I am on my FLs)

Thanks for the comprehensive response. By claim I mean those presented in passage. And I'll take my first AAMC FL tomorrow.
What do YOU look for when you read a passage? How many times do you pause to ensure you have absorbed a portion of the passage? How long does that take you? In other words, what about the passage do you have in your memory after finishing reading (like main idea, etc.)? Thanks again!

 

[neekzg]

Kind of hard to describe what I look for specifically, I just read very actively and try to absorb each word and picture the scenario as I'm reading. There will be a few times that I didn't quite understand the point of a phrase and then I'll read over it quickly again. I usually read the first paragraph very closely and skip to the last paragraph to see where the author will ultimately be going with the passage and see if anything is reinforced/reiterated and I'll have a better grasp of what the overall argument is going to be. If there are any paragraphs that list a bunch of little details, I'll read over it relatively quickly knowing that if I need it to answer a question, I'm most likely going to end up going back to it later anyway.