Experiment with Passage Reading Strategies and Find the Best for You

In your prep for the SAT, you may have read different strategies for how to read a passage and answer questions. Some students read the questions before reading the passage. Others read the passage in detail first.

At your high level, I can't predict which method will work best for you. We're going for perfection, which means that your strategy needs to line up with your strengths and weaknesses perfectly, or else you'll make mistakes or run out of time.

What I will do, however, is go through the most effective methods. You'll then have to figure out through your test data which one leads to the highest score for you.

Passage Method 1: Skim the Passage, then Read the Questions

This is the most common strategy I recommend to our students, and in my eyes the most effective. I prefer this one myself.

Here it is:

Skim the passage on the first read through. Don't try to understand every single line, or write notes predicting what the questions will be. Just get a general understanding of the passage. You want to try to finish reading the passage in 3 minutes, if possible.

Next, go to the questions. If the question refers to a line number, then go back to that line number and understand the text around it.

If you can't answer a question within 30 seconds, skip it.

My preferred way to tackle a passage: skimming it on the first read-through.

This strategy is a revelation for students who used to close-read a passage and run out of time.

This skimming method works because the questions will ask about far fewer lines than the passage actually contains. For example, lines 5-20 of a reading passage might not be relevant to any question that follows. Therefore, if you spend time trying to deeply understand lines 5-20, you’ll be wasting time.

By taking the opposite approach of going back to the passage when you need to refer to it, you guarantee reading efficiency. You're focusing only on the parts of the passage that are important to answering questions.

Critical Skill: You must be able to skim effectively. This means being able to quickly digest a text without having to slowly read every word. If you're not quite good at this yet, practice it on newspaper articles and your homework reading.

Passage Method 2: Read the Questions First and Mark the Passage

This is the second most common strategy and, if used well, as effective as the first method. But it has some pitfalls if you don't do it correctly.

Here's how it goes:

Before you read the passage, go to the questions and read each one.

If the question refers to a series of lines, mark those lines on the passage. Take a brief note about the gist of the question.

Go back to the passage and skim it. When you reach one of your notes, slow down and take more notice of the question.

Answer the questions.

Here's an example passage that I marked up, with questions on the right. Notice that beyond underlining the phrase referenced in the question, I left clues for myself on what's important to get out of this phrase.

In the hands of an SAT expert, this is a powerful strategy. Just like Method 1 above, you save time by skipping parts of the passage that aren't asked about. Furthermore, you get a head start on the questions by trying to answer them beforehand.

But there are serious potential pitfalls to this method if you're not careful or prepared enough.

Here's one: when you first read the questions before the passage, you won't have enough time to digest the actual answer choices (nor will they make sense to you). So you have to make your best guess for what the question is asking when you're writing a note along the passage.

In some cases, this can lead you astray. Take this example from above:

When I read the question, I saw that it referred to the phrase "tired of". So I noted this in the passage.

The problem is, the passage is using a metaphor. As I read the passage, I see my note, and I think "ok, she's tired of having paper bags waved in her eyes. Wait, what does this even mean?"

Only when I read the answer choices do I see that she's referring to answer B - "being teased about Joseph Tank." It's not obvious at all that this is what I should be getting from the passage, especially if I'm rushed for time.

Critical Skill: You need to have so much experience with the SAT Reading section that you can anticipate what the question is going to ask you for your notes to be helpful. If you're not sure of this, you can easily be led down the wrong track and focus on the wrong aspect of the passage.

Passage Method 3: Read the Passage In Detail, then Answer Questions

This method is what beginner students usually use by default, because it's what they've been trained to do in school. Some beginner books like Princeton Review and Kaplan also suggest this as a strategy.

It's my least favorite method because there are so many ways for it to go wrong. But for the sake of completeness, I'm listing it here in case it works best for you.

Here's how it goes:

Read the passage in detail, line by line.

Take notes to yourself about the main point of each paragraph.

Answer the questions.

As you might guess, I don't like this method for the following reasons:

By reading the passage closely, you absorb a lot of details that aren't useful for answering questions.

The notes you take aren't directed toward helping you answer the questions.

By interpreting the passage ahead of time, you risk being led astray.

But this might work especially well for you if you're very good at reading for understanding, and if you have so much expertise with the SAT that you can predict what the test is going to ask you about anyway.

Choose Which Works Best for You, Based on Test Data

Because I can't predict which one will work best for you, you need to figure this out yourself. To do this, you need cold, hard data from your test scores.

Try each method on 2 sample test passages each, and tally up your percentage score for each. If one of them is a clear winner for you, then develop that method further. If there isn't a clear winner, choose the one that feels most comfortable for you.