<p>What's the universal strategy? I take like 13 minutes per passage, when I should only take 8 min.... it's really bad.</p>
<p>I usually take 3 mins to read the passage (not an extremely focused read but not skimming either) and take 5 mins to do the questions. Others like to give 4 mins to each. There’s no universal strategy.</p>
<p>Ok… so reading the questions beforehand is a no? I just stopped doing that, and it saved me 2 minutes. so I’m down to 11 minutes/passage.</p>
<p>However, i did find reading the questions beforehand especially helpful for the social science section…</p>
<p>It really depends on you. The only time I would ever suggest reading the questions first though is to maybe mark down the line references and focus more on those parts as you come to them in your reading of the passage. This might be too time-consuming though.</p>
<p>^^^ Oh wow, when I took the ACT for the first time, I looked at the questions beforehand and I scanned the passage a bunch of times for all of the answers and it seemed to work pretty well (got a 32). Maybe I should try it without reading the questions.</p>
<p>I normally skim the questions first so that I can mark the lines that will be important.</p>
<p>The reading section is always the hardest for me in terms of keeping a good pace. After taking several practice tests, though, I realized that most of my time was being wasted on prose fiction, so I now start every reading section with the science passage and work my way backward. I suggest that you find which passages are generally easiest for you and then work those first. Also, if you know that a question is going to take up a lot of your time, just skip it- I know that may feel counterintuitive, but it’s better to get 5 easy questions correct in the time it would take you to mull over a difficult one (and possibly still get it wrong).</p>