Once in a while during his CAT preparations, every MBA aspirant goes through a phase I

call the RC Madness. Propelled by the battle cries of start reading, increase your RC
speed, build your vocabulary, read newspapers etc. he tries one thing after another to
gain that elusive accuracy in reading comprehension passages. Things become worse if he joins a
coaching institute; his classmates at his coaching are completely convinced that RC ke bina to kucch
nahin ho sakta and his English trainer, who never cracked CAT himself or went to an IIM, keeps
feeding him with ideas to attempt the RC passages. The trainer also keeps pressurizing him to become a
good reader. The trainer believes that he is right about the reading part. The better reader the student
becomes, the better he will be at RC passages.
Are better readers better at RC passages?
As they do every year, last year also, the premier coaching institutes published the answers to the CAT
2006, within a day after the exam. The answers for verbal sections were given by top English faculties at
each of these CAT prep institutes. Most of these top faculties were good readers and excellent in every
aspect of the language. Also, they solved the CAT paper not under pressure situation in the examination
hall but at leisure in their respective offices. They must have read every RC passage more than 10 times,
a luxury the students taking the CAT paper didnt have. And yet, when the IIMs released their answer
keys in January, 2007, most of the RC answers given by these institutes were wrong! (The same thing had
happened for CAT 2005 paper where many answers given by these institutes were incorrect).
Subsequently, all of them removed their answer keys from the websites. So here is the question once
again- Do better readers, like these English faculties, prove themselves better at RC passages?
The jury is still out on that question. But to me, this is NOT the question that a student should be asking.
The correct question to ask is how do I achieve cut-offs in verbal section of CAT? a Is this question
not same as how do I score well in RC passages? a Not really.
The worst thing about the verbal section is that a student can attempt most of the given questions. This is
not same as Quant or DI sections where he can attempt only a limited number of questions. Why is it a
bad thing? Because, a student wastes time reading and doing many extra questions in which his accuracy
will be poor rather than selecting some relatively easier questions and spending more time on them.
Lets do some mathematics- In CAT 2006, there were 25 questions of 4 marks each. To achieve 96
percentile in the verbal section (the cut offs are at 93 percentile) you needed to score 37 marks. Lets
make it 40 marks. To achieve 40 marks you needed to attempt 10 questions at 100 percent accuracy. If
you got one question wrong out of these 10, you would have still achieved your cut off. In essence, if you
attempted 12 questions, you could afford to get 2 of them wrong. Attempting 12 questions meant
attempting 50% of the section only. There were 15 RC questions, 5 sentence completion questions, and 5
inference, judgment questions. Technically speaking, if you spent your time only on sentence completion
and inference questions, you had ample time to find the right answers to these questions. Since these 10
questions would have barely taken 20 seconds to read, nearly all of the time could have been spent in
solving them. Which means that you could have avoided the RC completely! But is it a sane advice? No.
My real point is that if a student has CHOSEN one RC passage (completely ignoring the two others) from
the three given, he would have 15 questions at his disposal and he would have had ample time to attempt
these questions with a good accuracy. Therefore, in this article, I hereby present the first point of my RC
technique-

CHOOSE YOUR RC PASSAGE: This is the most important point in the verbal section. Dont
attempts every RC passage. Verbal section is like any other section- you need to select questions that
you are going to answer. Remember that it takes 10 minutes on average to answer an RC passage
completely. Attempting a tough RC passage consumes more time than you take for an average RC
passage, makes you unsure of your answers, leaves you unsettled and nervous about the paper. It
even tires you out mentally and increases the panic situation. The best strategy is to give a brief
glance to each RC passage, and then select the ones you are going to attempt. Make a firm resolve
that you will NOT look at the passages that you have excluded. How do you select a passage? I have
only one criterion- I select passages that are easier to read. Different people will find different
passages easier to read depending on their backgrounds.
In CAT 2006, had you attempted only one RC passage and ignored the two others completely, you
would have 15 questions at your disposal and you would have 50 minutes to solve them. You would

have had more time to think in every question and it would have increased your accuracy remarkably.
Even a 75% percent accuracy in these 15 questions would have fetched you the cut offs.

START SLOOOWWWLYYY: Most students start with an RC passage with a timer in their heads.
Therefore, they try to hit the ground running. They want to finish the first paragraph as soon as they
can, then move on to the second paragraph and finish it quickly and so on. In the process, they
lose track of the main idea of the passage, tone of the author, the structure of the passage etc. By the
time they reach halfway through the passage, they lose track of the argument and get confused.
These students do not understand that the most important part of a passage is the first
paragraph. The first paragraph introduces the topic and the main idea of the passage, and very often
states the authors position on it. Start with the first paragraph SLOWLY! Do not move on to the
second paragraph until you have understood the first one completely.

FORM AN OPINION AND TAKE A STAND: Do you realize how passively you absorb every line of
a passage that was written by some highly opinionated jerk? Do you ever question whether the
author of the passage is talking sense or feeding you crap? You become a punching bag whom
someone is hitting with his ideas. For a change, why not start questioning the content of the passage?
Why not start forming opinions about every paragraph in the passage and start taking sides? Trying to
judge every paragraph will have the following effect:

In order to form an opinion, you will be forced to read the contents of a passage very

minutely. You will become aware of the logical points the author is trying to put across to
convince you.

You will be forced to paraphrase every paragraph and summarize what the author is

You will become a highly active reader, become interested in the passage and be able to

trying to say.

maintain your focus throughout the passage.

CONNECT THE DOTS: While moving from one paragraph to another, be VERY aware of the logical
flow of the passage. Be conscious about how the passage is structured. At any point in the passage,
you should be able to say, the author started from X, then moved to Y, then discussed Z to prove
his point, then discussed some points against Z and connect every part of the passage
with the previous parts. Practice this technique again and again until it becomes a habit with you.

GO BACK TO THE PASSAGE TO ANSWER EVERY QUESTION: Many errors in RC passages

happen because a student facing crunch of time marks answers relying on his memory of the
passage. He marks the options which he thinks are similar to something he read in the
passage. Dont do it. The person who made the test is counting on you to do that and he has
deliberately put similar sounding options in the questions. Go back to the passage and check out
every option. Yes. EVERY option. Lets say that you are somewhat shaky about option b and
even after checking the passage feel that it is probably right. But if you keep checking out the options
you might find that option d is better than option b. So check every thing out. Be a suspicious
bastard.

In the end, realize that practicing these techniques will save you more time during your CAT exam than
will any other technique. Ignore those skim and scan cries coming from your English instructor. He
never cleared the CAT exam. I did. In 2005, I cracked every test paper I took; held all India ranks in top
10 throughout my mocks, cracked CAT, IIFT, and GMAT. And my marks were always the highest in the
verbal section.
It was because I never listened to my English instructor. The best advice I got was from a fellow test
taker- RC is similar to cheating. All the information is given in the passage. You just have to copy it
from there.
And I kept cheating. I kept reading the passage completely.