Increasing speed in verbal

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I created a new topic for this thread because the last thread of this topic type (as told by the handy little box that pops up) was in 2009.

I just finished 2 EK101 verbal tests and I scored a 12 in each (35/40 correct); however, I went over by 15 minutes on the first and 20 minutes on the second. I had a running clock, but I did not limit myself to 60 minutes for each test.

How do I increase my verbal speed? Reading the passage in 4 minutes is fine, I am finding myself getting stuck on roughly 1 question per passage, where I spend 2-3 minutes on that one question. Sometimes I get that question correct, other times I get it wrong. Those questions I can usually narrow the answer choices to a 50/50, but the answers might be very similar so I spend tremendous amounts of time going back to the passage to justify a selection.

When I take another EK101 verbal test, I will time myself and simply mark that answer and move on to see if I finish in under 60 minutes. Otherwise, how to you increase speed in answering the questions? I feel I have a fairly high accuracy in answering questions untimed, I simply need to answer faster!

Cheers, thanks.

 

[EmergDoc2B]

you have to do your practice passages timed or they're meaningless. Most Med School applicants could crush the verbal if it wasnt timed so those 12's give you a false sense of security in my opinion. You must simulate the time crunch in practice to excel under the time crunch on the real deal.

my 2 cents.

 

[aspiring20]

you have to do your practice passages timed or they're meaningless. Most Med School applicants could crush the verbal if it wasnt timed so those 12's give you a false sense of security in my opinion. You must simulate the time crunch in practice to excel under the time crunch on the real deal.

my 2 cents.

THIS

if you give me an entire day, i can probably get 38+/40 on every verbal test you throw at me. but we dont have a day; we have ONE hour, no more, no less.

 

[maybemed2013]

You need to do more practice. After you get your technique down you should start taking less time on vr passages. Once your technique is down start on VR test.

I NEVER did my daily passages timed, BUT I did do my practice VR section timed abt 2 months before my MCAT. And I ended up having 10 mins left to do my last vr passages for my mcat.

I think it dumb to time individual passages some 'easy' passages can took 6 mins and some 'hard' can take 12 mins but when you take a VR section test you have the correct mixture of easy and hard so it should take no more than 60 mins.

 

[GorgeousBorges]

you have to do your practice passages timed or they're meaningless. Most Med School applicants could crush the verbal if it wasnt timed so those 12's give you a false sense of security in my opinion. You must simulate the time crunch in practice to excel under the time crunch on the real deal.

my 2 cents.

Maybe that's true for you, but that wasn't my experience. When I was trying to improve verbal, I made a lot of the same mistakes whether I was taking 60 minutes or 120 minutes on them.

When I was practicing a new technique for verbal, I felt like I needed to slow things down to get the technique right, and then develop the speed after that.

I thought about it like playing piano. You need to practice things correctly and slowly before you can do them correctly and quickly.

Anyway, that's just what worked for me.

 

[Gauss44]

Maybe that's true for you, but that wasn't my experience. When I was trying to improve verbal, I made a lot of the same mistakes whether I was taking 60 minutes or 120 minutes on them.

When I was practicing a new technique for verbal, I felt like I needed to slow things down to get the technique right, and then develop the speed after that.

I thought about it like playing piano. You need to practice things correctly and slowly before you can do them correctly and quickly.

Anyway, that's just what worked for me.

Would you mind sharing the technique you used? This strategy of starting slow makes the most sense to me but I screwed it up somehow and never sped up. I just want to know how you did this right. Hopefully it will work for me too!

 

[GorgeousBorges]

Would you mind sharing the technique you used? This strategy of starting slow makes the most sense to me but I screwed it up somehow and never sped up. I just want to know how you did this right. Hopefully it will work for me too!

I actually used the Kaplan method of passage mapping, figuring out the main idea in each paragraph, topic, scope and all that. Doing this right caused me to slow down, but it improved my accuracy. Then, I gradually tried to see if I could improve the speed at which I was finishing passages while still doing things right. It ended up that I wasn't taking as much time on the questions any more because I could answer a lot of them quickly just by what I had already read and mapped.

I also went back and really dug into why I got wrong what I got wrong and incorporate that into my thinking. It's hard to explain how to do that because it's such a personal thing, but to get better beyond speed, you really need to think about the way that you think.

 

[Back 5]

I actually used the Kaplan method of passage mapping, figuring out the main idea in each paragraph, topic, scope and all that. Doing this right caused me to slow down, but it improved my accuracy. Then, I gradually tried to see if I could improve the speed at which I was finishing passages while still doing things right. It ended up that I wasn't taking as much time on the questions any more because I could answer a lot of them quickly just by what I had already read and mapped.

I also went back and really dug into why I got wrong what I got wrong and incorporate that into my thinking. It's hard to explain how to do that because it's such a personal thing, but to get better beyond speed, you really need to think about the way that you think.

Princeton Review uses a similar technique. 1 sentence summary of each paragraph followed by the bottom line. Where I find fault with this is that everything is done on the scratch paper, which takes time. Secondarily, you are supposed to answer the questions based on your annotations. If my interpretation of the paragraphs and my bottom line are incorrect, then my answers will be incorrect as well. I was not scoring well with this technique at all: only in the 60% range. By highlighting effectively and reading very intently, I mentally keep note of what I think is going on, but I still use the questions and answers to formulate a better idea of what the author is meaning. My accuracy has gone up a lot by doing this.

Anyway, I haven't been restricting my time as of yet because I wanted to nail down a strategy in the first 3 weeks before I started working on my time. No point in going faster if I don't have a high degree of accuracy. I figure 80%+ is a great starting point and hopefully I can shave 15-20 minutes off my time now

My plan for my next EK/TPR verbal test of 40 questions is to mark and answer those questions I would typically spend too much time on and seeing how much faster I finish. If it's really 1 or 2 questions per passage that are holding me up and pushing me long, then cutting down the time on them would be all I need.

I was hoping some of you all had tricks to answering the questions quicker as that is what I need.

 

[Trayshawn]

Single best verbal advice I've ever recieved:

If you answer the questions without going back to the passage, you WILL finish.

The battle simply becomes getting proficient enough in your reading and question/answer analysis that not going back to the passage doesn't make you wanna shave off your eyelashes.

 

[GorgeousBorges]

Princeton Review uses a similar technique. 1 sentence summary of each paragraph followed by the bottom line. Where I find fault with this is that everything is done on the scratch paper, which takes time. Secondarily, you are supposed to answer the questions based on your annotations. If my interpretation of the paragraphs and my bottom line are incorrect, then my answers will be incorrect as well. I was not scoring well with this technique at all: only in the 60% range. By highlighting effectively and reading very intently, I mentally keep note of what I think is going on, but I still use the questions and answers to formulate a better idea of what the author is meaning. My accuracy has gone up a lot by doing this.

Anyway, I haven't been restricting my time as of yet because I wanted to nail down a strategy in the first 3 weeks before I started working on my time. No point in going faster if I don't have a high degree of accuracy. I figure 80%+ is a great starting point and hopefully I can shave 15-20 minutes off my time now

My plan for my next EK/TPR verbal test of 40 questions is to mark and answer those questions I would typically spend too much time on and seeing how much faster I finish. If it's really 1 or 2 questions per passage that are holding me up and pushing me long, then cutting down the time on them would be all I need.

I was hoping some of you all had tricks to answering the questions quicker as that is what I need.

If you want to answer questions more quickly, I would say this: predict answers when ever possible. Don't spend a lot of time evaluating each answer choice; know what the answer is going to be, and then match your answer to what you thought it was going to be. You can't do this for every question, but for some questions it can save a ton of time.

 

[maybemed2013]

Single best verbal advice I've ever recieved:

If you answer the questions without going back to the passage, you WILL finish.

The battle simply becomes getting proficient enough in your reading and question/answer analysis that not going back to the passage doesn't make you wanna shave off your eyelashes.

Not true.. on the 1/24 MCAT I went back to the passages multiply times. I went back to the passages for abt 21 questions.
And had abt 10 mins remaining for the last passages.

 

[AktionPOTENTIAL]

Not true.. on the 1/24 MCAT I went back to the passages multiply times. I went back to the passages for abt 21 questions.
And had abt 10 mins remaining for the last passages.

Shed some light on your strategy, please!

 

[Trayshawn]

Not true.. on the 1/24 MCAT I went back to the passages multiply times. I went back to the passages for abt 21 questions.
And had abt 10 mins remaining for the last passages.

Reread what I said. I never mentioned that you couldn't finish verbal if you went back to the passage. I said that if you DIDN'T go back to the passage you would certainly finish.

See the big difference? There's some verbal reasoning for ya!

 

[EmergDoc2B]

Maybe that's true for you, but that wasn't my experience. When I was trying to improve verbal, I made a lot of the same mistakes whether I was taking 60 minutes or 120 minutes on them.

When I was practicing a new technique for verbal, I felt like I needed to slow things down to get the technique right, and then develop the speed after that.

I thought about it like playing piano. You need to practice things correctly and slowly before you can do them correctly and quickly.

Anyway, that's just what worked for me.

OP says they are killing it by going slow. 12's regularly. So, OP needs to speed it up and you do this by timing yourself and holding yourself to that time just like test conditions. How else can you get the timing of the test down?

 

[MedPR]

I created a new topic for this thread because the last thread of this topic type (as told by the handy little box that pops up) was in 2009.

I just finished 2 EK101 verbal tests and I scored a 12 in each (35/40 correct); however, I went over by 15 minutes on the first and 20 minutes on the second. I had a running clock, but I did not limit myself to 60 minutes for each test.

How do I increase my verbal speed? Reading the passage in 4 minutes is fine, I am finding myself getting stuck on roughly 1 question per passage, where I spend 2-3 minutes on that one question. Sometimes I get that question correct, other times I get it wrong. Those questions I can usually narrow the answer choices to a 50/50, but the answers might be very similar so I spend tremendous amounts of time going back to the passage to justify a selection.

When I take another EK101 verbal test, I will time myself and simply mark that answer and move on to see if I finish in under 60 minutes. Otherwise, how to you increase speed in answering the questions? I feel I have a fairly high accuracy in answering questions untimed, I simply need to answer faster!

Cheers, thanks.

Try reading the passage slower (and more carefully). Worked for me and my scores stayed in the 11-13 range.

I finished VR on my real test with 7 minutes to spare and got an 11.

 

[Clinicall]

My verbals have been very irregular, sometimes I get a 6 and sometimes I get a 9. I still have 4 months to improve, but I realized that sometimes I read the passage for the sake of reading it, instead of actually trying to analyze and interpret the passage. After every paragraph I'm trying to sum up the paragraph or an idea in a sentence or two (I read this tip somewhere on here) and it seems to help.

I have another question for some of you as well, is there a particular time you strive for in each passage, such as 8-10 minutes? My other question is how many passages are there on the MCAT? Does it vary from like 6-8 total? Or is there a guarantee there will be no more than 7, but atleast 40 question?

 

[Back 5]

I tried 3 passages today setting the timer at 8 minutes. Got killed on the 3 passages. Maybe I was too concerned with the timer going in the background? I couldn't focus on the passages at all and didn't feel like I was even understanding the questions.

I do have a headache and don't feel like I slept well last night. I will not continue on passages today as I feel like I will waste passages given how I feel and am performing right now.

I'm worried about how many passages I have left. I have 40 passages left in TPR verbal workbook and 10 verbal tests remaining in ExamKrackers 101 passages.

 

[Renaissance Man]

you have to do your practice passages timed or they're meaningless. Most Med School applicants could crush the verbal if it wasnt timed so those 12's give you a false sense of security in my opinion. You must simulate the time crunch in practice to excel under the time crunch on the real deal.

my 2 cents.

This. I wrote a whole series of posts about improving Verbal scores on my blog, and I would link but Mods would probably get mad at me, so follow my signature and search for it. But, one of my main points is that reading speed shouldn't really be an issue.

Work on your active reading skills. Personally, I don't like the passage mapping. I used the highlighter sparingly to remind myself about main points, or important details. If you are doing VR right, you should probably only need to refer back to the passage once or twice when going through the questions. Just my 2 cents.

 

[EmergDoc2B]

I tried 3 passages today setting the timer at 8 minutes. Got killed on the 3 passages. Maybe I was too concerned with the timer going in the background? I couldn't focus on the passages at all and didn't feel like I was even understanding the questions.

I do have a headache and don't feel like I slept well last night. I will not continue on passages today as I feel like I will waste passages given how I feel and am performing right now.

I'm worried about how many passages I have left. I have 40 passages left in TPR verbal workbook and 10 verbal tests remaining in ExamKrackers 101 passages.

Thats perfectly fine. Move the timer to ten minutes and try again. Then the next 3 try 9:45 or 9:30 and so on. Your training so its ok to fall on your arse in the beginning. Your timed efforts will begin to pay off and you will have confidence as you progress. I started at 10 minutes and worked my way to 7 minutes on some passages.

I concur with the poster above that passage mapping was useless for me. I also rarely highlighted unless it was a crazy humanities passage with 5 greek names I had to sort out. Be diligent in your practice and your times will drop fairly quickly while retaining high scores.

 

[EmergDoc2B]

I last tid bit of advice I was given that worked for me. It's hoakey but it worked. I read the passages like I was talking / explaining the passage to my best friend. It made it easier to stay engaged in the process. This may just be how my brain works but thought I would throw it out there.

 

[Back 5]

Thats perfectly fine. Move the timer to ten minutes and try again. Then the next 3 try 9:45 or 9:30 and so on. Your training so its ok to fall on your arse in the beginning. Your timed efforts will begin to pay off and you will have confidence as you progress. I started at 10 minutes and worked my way to 7 minutes on some passages.

I concur with the poster above that passage mapping was useless for me. I also rarely highlighted unless it was a crazy humanities passage with 5 greek names I had to sort out. Be diligent in your practice and your times will drop fairly quickly while retaining high scores.

I took a breather, had some caffeine and went to my verbal class for TPR. We ended up doing a set of 3 passages timed at 9 mins a piece, or 27 mins total. I ended up scoring 15/19 for those 3 passages. Now, those were from the In-Class Compendium, so I am unsure if the difficulty of those passages are the same as the verbal workbook passages.

I feel like I am not learning my content review as throughly as needed (I just started my 4th week of review) so I need my verbal score to be as high as possible to make up for it

 

[EmergDoc2B]

Your a month into it so dont wig out. 🙂 Keep plugging away at your passages ( I recommend the EK series for passages) and do 3 a day until your done. Timed of course. Your confidence will increase and your scores will follow. The key is that at a slower pace your killing it so you comprehend the passages and are able to spot distractors well. You just need to do it quicker. You got this!

 

[Temperature101]

After doing many VR passages, I have noticed a few things that can make someone very successful in VR. I define success as being able to score 9+. First of all, you have to be able read these passages in less than 3 mins and at the same time get the main idea . If you can do that, you have plenty of time to refer back to the passage because I have noticed a lot of these questions neccessitate going back to the passage... By having more time to fish for answers obviously ease off some of the time constraint pressure and therefore increase your accuracy... The other stuff I have also noticed is that most of the time there are two answers that are closely related and if one can detect nuances between these two answers, they are more likely to choose the correct one...

Here is my question: How can I read these passages in less than 3 mins and also get the main idea?

 

[krogers21]

I am the type of person who best learns through reading as I have found that reading best helps me understand unknown/flawed concepts. My method is very simple in that I essentially read the passage extremely slowly and question my understanding after every sentence. I quiz myself on the author's intent as though I'm communicating with a friend. I spend probably 45 of the 60 minutes allotted simply reading and understanding and give myself the other 15 minutes to answer questions. Think of it like this.. If you typically spend 3 minutes reading a passage and can understand the main passage, you can understand the details in 7 minutes and answer the questions in a minute (given you briefly skim the questions prior to reading). This is essentially what I do. Maybe this can help.