Reading Comprehension

Received a PM asking me to respond.

FYI: I'm leaving on vacation in a few hours and won't be back until 5 July. While I'm gone, please talk to other experts; otherwise, I will reply after I return. (It may take me a few days after I get back to get through the backlog of PMs).

The main takeaways are to look at the structure, then ask the "why" the details are there, not of the "what the heck zxcasdaca means",

Love it! Good advice - structure and understanding why the author wrote what he wrote in each paragraph are really important because then you understand the overall point and flow of info. If you get a "what" question, you can go back and find "zxcasdaca" and figure out what it means then.

I haven't found it to be the case that the later RC passages are much tougher, actually - I think that's the one exception to the "higher numbers = harder difficulty" rule in OG. Each passage has some easier and some harder questions. You mentioned hating bio and history passages and getting more of those, so that might be more of the problem. It's also possibly that you're seeing a slightly higher proportion of certain question types that are harder for you - eg, if you're worse at inference questions and there are a few more of those... then those passages are going to be harder for you.

Go back to some of the passages you've already done (the ones you found harder) and start by trying to understand WHY you didn't understand whatever you didn't understand. Did you get confused by technical language? Was there a ton of annoying detail? Did you still get the main "point" or did you not even get that? If you didn't get the main point, is that because you were distracted by other stuff and forgot to make yourself find the point? Or was the language so confusing that you just weren't even sure what the main point was?

Go back now and try to figure out the main point (with no time limit). What prevented you from figuring this out before? That tells you what you need to study to get it right next time. (Most of the time, people miss the main point simply because they get distracted / overwhelmed by other stuff in the passage and this hurts their ability to concentrate on the main point.)

Generally speaking, if I find the passage itself extra tough, I focus even more on the high level and even less on the detail than I normally do. Most people do just the opposite but that is NOT what you want to do - if you aren't getting it already, then diving deeper into the detail usually doesn't help much. Instead, acknowledge that there's going to be stuff that you don't figure out on this passage - at least not on your initial read-through. Concentrate on getting the main point of the whole thing and understanding why each paragraph is sitting there. Is that paragraph mostly providing background? Is it providing support for the main point? Is it an example of some key point? Is it offering ideas that go against the main point? Maybe there are two different theories and one paragraph is about one theory and another paragraph is about the other theory? Etc.

(I've got a BTG article about The Point coming out on... I think it's July 6th. So keep an eye out for that.)

Here are some articles that can help in general with how to read RC passages and how to analyze and learn from RC questions. To adapt this for harder passages or questions, again, tell yourself that you might not get it all, or you might not get the right answer, but you're at least going to get the big picture or you're at least going to eliminate some wrong answers. Then actually figure out how to do that by going over some of your past passages and questions without a time limit. Then (and only then!) test yourself on some new passages. First learn the technique / learn how to get better (mostly using stuff you've already done), then test yourself on new stuff.

https://www.beatthegmat.com/mba/2010/04/ ... mp-passage
https://www.beatthegmat.com/mba/2010/02/ ... e-question

And I'm back! Vacation was great.

I like your idea of a checklist - but I can think of two different types of checklists and I'm not sure which one you're talking about (or maybe you're talking about something I haven't even thought of!). Two levels:

1) When I'm doing a problem (under timed conditions), what should I be doing? What should I be thinking? (the "how to read" RC article talks about this stuff)
2) When I'm analyzing a problem, what should I be analyzing? What do I need to learn? How will I remember it next time? (The "how to analyze" article talks about this stuff)