Intro to Reading Comprehension
Reading Comprehension on the LSAT tests a lot of things. But one thing it does not test is reading….
I am not joking. The way you are going to read these passages is unlike any reading you have done before or will do after. We need to develop a completely separate skill set for RC sections, and that is exactly what the next few chapters are going to do.
What We Already Know
- 26 to 28 questions per RC section
- Questions are divided among 4 passages
- The 4 passages cover science, humanities, law, and social sciences, in random order (so that no student gets an unfair advantage from their background)
Why RC Is Hard
Most RC questions are not genuinely difficult the way hard LR questions are. There is no complex conditional logic, no chaining, no finding a reasoning gap. If you had unlimited time, you could answer nearly all of them correctly by rereading whatever you needed, double checking, triple checking, and so on.
The problem is you do not have unlimited time. You have 35 minutes for 4 passages of dense text and 26 to 28 questions. Double checking is out. And the single biggest time killer — going back to the passage on every question — needs to be eliminated entirely.
Time management on RC sections is everything.
The Core Strategy
The goal is to read each passage once, understand it, and annotate it in a way that means you rarely need to go back to it.
This raises an obvious question: how do you know which questions require going back to the passage and which ones you can answer directly? The answer comes from the question stem, exactly like in LR sections. After reading an RC question stem, you will know whether you need to refer back or not. We will cover every question type in the chapters that follow.
Time Allocation per Passage
The 26 to 28 questions are not divided evenly across the 4 passages. A typical distribution might look like: 5, 8, 6, 7. You need to allocate your time accordingly.
A simple rule of thumb: add 2 to the number of questions for that passage to get your target time in minutes.
Using the 5, 8, 6, 7 distribution:
| Passage | Questions | Target Time |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 5 | 7 minutes |
| 2 | 8 | 10 minutes |
| 3 | 6 | 8 minutes |
| 4 | 7 | 9 minutes |
You do not need to time yourself precisely against these numbers. They are estimates that tell you to spend more time on passages 2 and 4 than on 1 and 3.
Regardless of the number of questions, you want to spend 4 to 4:45 minutes reading and annotating each passage. This is enough time, when done correctly, to understand the passage well enough to answer most questions without going back.
Using passage 1 as an example: of the 7 minutes allocated, roughly 4 minutes go to reading and annotation, and roughly 3 minutes go to answering the 5 questions. That is the end goal.
TL;DR
- Glance at the number of questions per passage and set a rough time target (questions + 2 minutes).
- Spend 4 to 4:45 minutes reading and annotating the passage.
- When answering questions, use the question stem to decide whether to answer directly or refer back to the passage.
Bad Strategies
You will come across some questionable advice on the internet and on Reddit. Stay away from these two in particular.
Reading the questions first. The idea is that if you read the questions before the passage, you will know what to look for while reading. This is bad advice. Very bad. You will be juggling too many things in your head at once. The questions will distract you while reading the passage, and without any context from the passage, the questions themselves will just confuse you further. This reliably wastes more time than it saves. Passage first, then questions. Always.
Skimming the passage and going back per question. The idea here is to skim for a general sense of the passage, then refer back to the relevant section for each question. This does not work either. Recall that for some question types, you should not be going back to the passage at all. If you skimmed rather than read properly, you will struggle on those questions and end up wasting time going back and forth between the passage and the answer choices anyway.
The next chapter covers what exactly to do during those 4 to 4:45 minutes of reading.