Like I said the article will be up soon but feel free, if any of you have ANY questions on the OAT to leave article comments on
www.optometrystudents.com (preferred method) or you can also pm me here. Since the article isn't up yet, I will try and give a more immediate answer here (this will pretty much just all be repeated in my article).
There are many successful strategies that students have employed for RC, however there don't seem to be more than a few that commonly pop up. One of the less common and easiest to describe strategies is 'question hunting'. Right off the bat without even reading the article, some students skip directly to the questions to save time on not having to read/outline a passage, and then hunt through to quickly find the answers. Many students have performed extremely well with this strategy; I'd never advise it for a student more like myself, however, because I seemed to do much better by reading and taking very light notes for each paragraph. I would jot down just a couple 'main ideas/topics' that each paragraph covered as I read through the passage, but again I really tried to minimize the length of the notes I took because I didn't want to waste too much time (we all know how huge timing issues are). I will say though, that if you are going to read the passage first, I would advise you to 'read' it and not skim it; these articles aren't all that long, so skimming thoroughly (which you'd have to do because there are so many 'detail' questions) is pretty much the same as just reading the whole thing. If your reading speed isn't up to par, then definitely practice reading passages (preferably, passages that AREN'T interesting to you, as interest factor in passages seems to correlate with higher scores).
In the end, the strategies that seem to work best for most students do involve light note-taking, but every student is different! You have to practice lots of RC passages under timed conditions so as to find and personalize the best strategy for you; it may very well end up looking different than the strategy that ended up working for me.
Good luck on the next attempt!
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