Reading Comprehension (RC) can be one of the most intractable areas of the GMAT for good reasons: consider how many hours in your life that you have spent reading and how strong your habits around reading are. In addition, if you haven’t read many books in English, you’re unlikely to be able to catch up during the few months of your GMAT prep. However, I encourage you to be sanguine: here are some suggestions that may help.
First of all, knowing the purport of what you’re studying is one key to motivation and success (check out another blogpost on this). Consider what RC is trying to achieve. The test is checking that you’re able to comprehend a difficult text (often an academic article) and respond to it cogently. This is something you’ll need to do both at business school and in your future career.
Additionally, the texts are deliberately random: you’ll see things about business and technology, but also about physics, biology, sociology, history, and other topics. Being ready to make sense of an unfamiliar topic requires the kind of flexibility that business consultants display: they may not know that particular area well, but they can still make judicious observations and deductions. In total, these are useful skills that are worth developing.
Next, let’s look at the actual skill of reading. It’s tempting to focus on opaque cognitive issues such as how your eyes move over the page, how you recognize certain words, and how your brain turns symbols into meaning. Sure, these are part of it, but the paramount issue is engagement. Think of how some children have trouble paying attention in a boring class at school, yet the same kids will spend uninterrupted hours studying sports statistics, reading comics, or playing with Lego. If you’re not interested in what you’re doing, then it’s a struggle to focus on it.
Know that engagement is not immutable: it’s the result of a lot of different influences. To take another school example, if your classmates say that Math is boring, your parents say that they could never do Math, and perhaps even the teacher tells you that it’s just something you have to do, then your engagement is likely to be low. The answer to this predicament might be to hang around with people who like doing whatever it is you want to do. You’ll get inspired! On top of this, we can cultivate our own engagement through creative means and searching for resources that appeal to us. For example, when I was learning Russian, I found some TV comedies that I liked and wanted to understand. I quickly developed an edacious appetite for studying. Finding little tricks to stimulate our engagement may help with Reading Comprehension: something as simple as imagining that you’re discuss the topic with somebody you care about may help to raise your attention.
Further, our reading speed is highly influenced by our background knowledge. This is something that I’ve noticed in myself: I’m not much of an expert on anything, but I have a good breadth of knowledge. When doing GMAT RC, I often find myself commenting ‘I’ve heard of that somewhere.’ This definitely helps both my engagement and my speed of comprehension. I’m convinced that general knowledge is a boon on RC.
The same goes for vocabulary. Rather than having a section (as in the GRE) that tests your vocab directly, the GMAT integrates this into RC. Increasing your vocab can be an operose area of study: it’s a slow process, and it’s likely that your time would be better spent on other things. However, the skill of gauging the meaning of words in context is something that you can definitely get better at (see below).
In conclusion, RC is definitely an area that repays innovative study. Simply “doing” lots of problems will likely be less efficient than considering some of the things above and adjusting your study approaches. Here are some suggestions:
• Get to know the test. Try out a few problems from the Official Guide. There are lots of excellent resources here, but there’s no prize for completing them all. Try to categorize the different question types.
• Watch my video about what to look out for on your “first read”.
• Check out some of my study suggestions.
• Integrate reading into your daily routine. Pick out articles on topics of less interest to you that would normally eschew. Here are some recommended resources: www.theeconomist.com www.scientificamerican.com www.nybooks.com hbr.org www.nytimes.com
• Expand your general knowledge. If reading doesn’t come naturally to you, then stimulate your general knowledge with podcasts and audiobooks. Here are a couple from the BBC: In Our Time (History and Culture) The Infinite Monkey Cage (Science and Technology)
• Try out this online vocab trainer: https://www.vocabulary.com/vocabtrainer/
• Develop your skill of guessing the meaning of words from context. You can start this now! I purposely used some obscure words in this article; scan back though the article to find the following words, guess their meaning from the context, and then check your understanding with a dictionary. Intractable, sanguine, purport, cogently, judicious, opaque, paramount, immutable, edacious, boon, operose, gauging.
A note on dyslexia and other learning disabilities:
Reading dense texts on a screen can be especially difficult for some people, and it’s worth remembering that if you’ve qualified for extra time on other exams, then you may do so on the GMAT. Check out the page about Testing Accommodations on the official GMAT website. If you do qualify for extra time, many of the above suggestions are still worth trying out.
