Strategies on RC

[swooth01]

Hey Everyone. Just wanted to know some of your guys strategies for the RC. I took the Kaplan course and they suggest you make a mini map as you read the articles. Writing down the key points as you're going along and, of course, making sure you know which paragraph contains that certain information.

However, I feel that I'm wasting a lot of time writing down the info and than looking up to where I left off. I'm trying to get into the habit of writing as I read but it can get really messy at times. And I find that I'm barely making it through the RC in my practice tests. I'm basically clicking like mad on the last 2-3 questions usually.

Anyone have some tips for me? Thanks in advance.

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[Hysteria24]

I just went through some practice tests earlier tonight and this is what I came away with.

At first I tried the quick skim and go right to the questions, then search for answers. That did not work for me at all.

In the end I found that using a version of what you suggested as the best method for myself. I just wrote a couple words down for each paragraph. Then once I got to a specific question, I knew exactly where to look, with no time lost searching.

 

[hokie4life]

but most of the questions i've done are always detail questions from what I've seen so far in topscore and kaplan material so my -go to the questions first and then look for answer without reading any of the paras- works great! i just have been mastering this quick hunt technique and my topscore reading went up a lot! but the real thing isn't gonna be like this i know that there will be more tone type questions which i think your alls map approach is good for but there's no real practice for that so i'm just gonna try to get as best as i can with his hunt approach so that way i'll have time left to do the tone questions.

 

[Hysteria24]

For some reason I could not do that. I would search and search looking for a key word and would sometimes have to go through the passage multiple times to find that detailed answer. If I read though the whole thing first, then I knew that the sat I was looking for was exactly in a certain part of a specific paragraph, and could go directly to it.

I think this all comes down to personal preference, and what were best at.

 

[AaBbZz]

The search and look method usually works but I feel like the reading section has gotten a lot harder and has more inference questions. I use to do the search method but I found doing a modified version of kaplan's version is best.

Instead of writing down quesitions I just pick out the stuff which has the best chances of being asked like when they start to list things write what theme were they listing.

Anything in "" write down

And anything that you think is really important to the article

Reading the whole article first gives you an opportunity to understand the tone of the passage and get the jist of what the author is actually trying to do.

Also I found that this way dramatically decreases the chances of not searching and finding correctly because if you can't do that effectively your screwed