reading PS passages

[mrhealth]

i know this has been discussed many times on this board and i really should have finalized this by now. i tried doing both strategies of reading the PS passages and the strategy of not reading (just glance at equations/tables). neither one seems to stand out as being better. i feel like when i read the passages, i have an idea of the topic its on, but all of the info kind of just goes in one end and out the other and it takes a lot of time to really understand some of the passages even though questions may not require that in depth understanding. in the end, however, i dont know how much time i actually save by not reading the passages because i end up going back so many times to make sure that an answer isnt hidden in there somewhere. has anyone experimented with both and made a decision? id like to hear how others have worked this out. ive been scoring 11+ on aamc 5-7 (skipping seemed very doable on these) and a 10 on aamc8. kaplan have been lower at 9-11.

for verbal, i started by skimming and getting the idea and going to the questions. it wasnt until i really read slowly and understood the passages the first time through that my verbal scores started going up.

for bs, i read the bio passages closely, but skip the ochem stuff and that seems to work out fine.

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[Mister Pie]

I always read for PS and VR, though sometimes I have to skim if time seems short.

Sometimes the ochem readings are kind of pointless because they're just saying things like "Oh, then I poured in some HCl. Then some NaNO3. The I separate." and all that information is contained in a diagram below. Still, once in a while they include some results which aren't in the diagram (H NMR showed that compounds 1 and 3 were the same, etc) so I still skim ochem passages.

 

[grapeflavorsoda]

i know this has been discussed many times on this board and i really should have finalized this by now. i tried doing both strategies of reading the PS passages and the strategy of not reading (just glance at equations/tables). neither one seems to stand out as being better. i feel like when i read the passages, i have an idea of the topic its on, but all of the info kind of just goes in one end and out the other and it takes a lot of time to really understand some of the passages even though questions may not require that in depth understanding. in the end, however, i dont know how much time i actually save by not reading the passages because i end up going back so many times to make sure that an answer isnt hidden in there somewhere. has anyone experimented with both and made a decision? id like to hear how others have worked this out. ive been scoring 11+ on aamc 5-7 (skipping seemed very doable on these) and a 10 on aamc8. kaplan have been lower at 9-11.

for verbal, i started by skimming and getting the idea and going to the questions. it wasnt until i really read slowly and understood the passages the first time through that my verbal scores started going up.

for bs, i read the bio passages closely, but skip the ochem stuff and that seems to work out fine.

Read all the passages! The alloted time is more than enough to finish reading the passages and do all the problems(even slow turtle like myself have enough time to finish the PS and BS sections although VR is barely enough).

if one usually runs out of time doing PS or BS sections, it has more to do the way one solves/approaches the problems and not because one is reading passages or not.