<p>I've always had a history of lacking reading comprehension skills when it comes to what I call dull (GRE-like passages) and difficult to understand texts. This was shown when I took the ACT and SAT and now I am finding the same thing with the GRE.</p>
<p>I took a GRE course this summer and my instructor told me that reading comprehension questions are the hardest types of GRE questions to improve on and that we shouldn't waste too much time practicing them, since it won't pay off.
Do you guys agree with that statement?
As in, if I did a bunch of reading comprehension problems and tried to learn from my mistakes, it won't help improve my score?
I find that I make a mixture of both. I make stupid mistakes a lot (usually by not paying attention). My conceptual mistakes are usually mainly because I tend to read the passage a little too fast by my standards (which is probably slow by other people's standards), resulting in a lack of understanding of the passage and failure to note some of the key facts. Even if I slow down, I still have this problem and naturally by slowing down, I'll also run out of time. </p>
<p>That's pretty discouraging, if so.</p>
<p>I guess it all depends on the "kind" of mistakes you are making. I.E if you're just making stupid mistakes, then you can probably fix that. But if you making conceptual mistakes from a lack of reading skills, then that will take too long to fix and practicing problems will probably not help?</p>
<p>I can understand the problem you are facing. I would suggest that before starting with the RC problems, you should try and pace up your reading speed. </p>
<p>What I mean is that you can start timing your general reading and then jotting down a brief summary of what were your key takeaways from the passage, followed by checking how good you did. Hope this helps!</p>
<p>Not sure if this reply is too late, but one poster mentioned that he started reading newspapers and that would definitely improve RC skills in a couple months. Just read articles in the New York Times and the Wall Street journal, or the Washington Post. I think that would help anyone who was trying to improve their reading skills. Reading comprehention has always been my strong point simply because I grew up reading. But those news articles would provide a great crash course. Just take time to understand the content and over time it will get earier to read complex articles quickly. Good luck everyone!</p>
<p>In my view, it is not possible to move your RC <em>basis</em> in a few months. The basis comes from a lifetime of engagement with words in English. Falling in love with them, devouring them through your eyes and shooting them out your fingertips, letting them have access to your deepest secrets, etc. The GRE, more than the SAT, wants to find out if you’ve engaged with academic language and arguments in this way, and clearly it is something you personally find not very stimulating, so I don’t think your basis will move much. </p>
<p>In a few months, your score absolutely can be <em>optimized</em>, a boost of perhaps 8 points on a good day, by growing to understand how the GRE works, which is bombarding you with a feast of tempting wrong choices to create a bell curve in people’s ability to avoid mental mistakes and oversights. The Kaplan books do that, and your coach might be able to as well.</p>
<p>I am a GRE Instructor for Kaplan, and you can improve your GRE Reading Comprehension score. </p>
<p>Reading comprehension is now roughly 1/2 your verbal score; you need to identify and work through the issues relating to how to form an argument, how to parse a paragraph, how to take good notes about a passage. The best way to improve is tutoring with someone with a good Verbal score because they will keep you focused on what’s important, and self-study. </p>
<p>Kaplan uses their online resources to track what skills are problematic for each student, so that a tutor can focus on what the student is having the most problems with. That online resource is the most valuable part of Kaplan, as it keeps preparation targeted and focused on the end goal - improving your score.</p>