Highlight or Not - VR

[Pisiform]

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After doing many Verbal passages from EK 101 and TPRH, I came to a conclusion that highlighting is not the best option. Since most of the question are based on passage as a whole, highlighting usually consumes much of the time. I found myself doing better without highlighting.

But since I was running out of VR material, I started doing Kaplan. I kept the same strategy of NOT highlighting and I realized that I bombed the passages. Almost all of the questions forced me refer back to the passage. So, after doing few Kaplan passages, I developed a strategy of highlighting passages and doing well.

So my question is, whenever I do passages from EK 101 & TPRH I have a one strategy (DON'T HIGHLIGHT) and whenever I do passages from Kaplan I have a totally different strategy (HIGHLIGHT). Is that even legit? I thought we should just stick to one strategy and work on it. How the hell in the real exam would I figure out whether the questions are Kaplan like or EK/TPRH like?

 

[muhali3]

Everyone has their own individual strategy. I personally recommend learning how to read as fast as possible (while also understanding everything you read). Just know the general structure of the passage and the main argument. If a question requires detailed information (which it rarely does), you can always go back to the passage and find it. Taking the time to highlight every single thing you think might be relevant is a wate of time (imo).

 

[Erythropoietin]

After doing many Verbal passages from EK 101 and TPRH, I came to a conclusion that highlighting is not the best option. Since most of the question are based on passage as a whole, highlighting usually consumes much of the time.

But since I was running out of VR material, I started doing Kaplan. I kept the same strategy of not highlighting and I realized that I bombed the passages. Almost all of the questions forced me refer back to the passage. So, after doing few Kaplan passages, I developed a strategy of highlighting passages and doing well.

So my question is, whenever I do passages from EK 101 & TPRH I have a one strategy and whenever I do passages from Kaplan I have a totally different strategy. Is that even legit? I thought we should just stick to one strategy and work on it. How the hell in the real exam would I figure out whether the questions are Kaplan like or EK/TPRH like?

I had a similar problem. That's because one of your strategies works best for main idea type questions and the other works best for detail type questions. I realized that EK and AAMC focus more on the main idea, so I don't highlight a lot. But I end up highlighting a lot for TBR, TPRH, and Kaplan passages because they ask more detail. Rather than saying "should I highlight this passage or not?", I decided to identify passages first and then decide whether or not to highlight; I highlight more for natural science passages, since they include a lot of details.
I believe the weakness of Kaplan and TBR questions is that they ask a lot of detail questions on humanities passages. But IMO, humanities and literature passages do not include much detail.

 

[Essee]

Personally I think highlighting is a waste of time especially since you don't know what is going to be important for the questions. What I DO suggest highlighting though, are names of people/animals/eras etc.

Sometimes questions might ask "John Doe's theory on blah blah blah implies that ...." If the passage was really dense with a lot of names, reading the names wastes time so instead of processing the name in my head, I would just highlight it so if I did need to refer back to remember who John Doe was, it's easy to find.

 

[HerbalPlz]

Personally I think highlighting is a waste of time especially since you don't know what is going to be important for the questions. What I DO suggest highlighting though, are names of people/animals/eras etc.

Sometimes questions might ask "John Doe's theory on blah blah blah implies that ...." If the passage was really dense with a lot of names, reading the names wastes time so instead of processing the name in my head, I would just highlight it so if I did need to refer back to remember who John Doe was, it's easy to find.

Hmm...I like this. I'll try it for a while and see how it goes. Thanks for the tip!