I am an extremely slow reader…any tips on how to score better in reading?
8 min/ per passage. Spend 2-3 minutes reading the 10 questions, then read the passage and look for the answers with the 6 minutes that are left. DO NOT BE A PERFECTIONIST! You must move on after 8 minutes, there may be easy questions ahead and you do not want to miss them. Easy questions count just as much as hard questions!
You do NOT have to take the test in order.
Do the section you like first, or what you hate (the most) last! (most kids do the worst on the Prose/Literary Fiction and save it for for last.)
A typical student will use this order: 1.Natural Science, 2. Social Science, 3. Humanities and 4. Prose Fiction.
The reading section is one that trips up a lot of students. It’s not that the passages or questions are hard, but that the answers are tricky. Your timing will get better over time. Practice reading anything, all the time. The more you read, the faster you’ll get.
Here are 3 steps to use every time in the reading section:
- Read the question with the answer choices covered.
- Come up with your best answer based on the information available from the passage.
- Kill all the answer choices that don’t match your answer.
2 is key. Come up with your answers before you look at the answers provided. This way you won’t be influenced by the tricky answers the College Board provides.
More importantly, don’t worry about the details as you read! The best SAT reading strategy is to read through quickly, getting only the main idea, tone, and purpose of the passage, along with a “mental table of contents” that will allow you to find relevant info more quickly. Then, when you read the questions, fly back to the relevant portions of the passage, get the details you need, and plug them into the problem. You don’t need to memorize everything on your first reading - in fact, you barely need to memorize ANYTHING!
The OP asked about the ACT, not the SAT
ALL of the answer choices must be considered.
Reading anything other than the real ACT tests will not help the OP improve his/her timing.