It would be curious to think that the GMAT was punishing you for your poor performance and the reading comp.!

I had a tutoring student who got all of the reading comp passages in a row (he had three passages and 14 questions).

I would not use the word "random" when speaking of the Computer-adaptive GMAT, but I know of nothing that you could do that would cause the test to decide to back-to-back 2 of your reading comp. passages. After I took the test last time and only got 10 critical reasoning, I joked that because Critical Reasoning is so good for me the test gave me the least of those!

One good thing you can do is improve that reading comp. so that there is no reason for the test to "punish" you.



Here is something that I wrote a little while ago that might help you:

"Two thoughts for you on reading comp are

1) Realize that something like 3/4 of all reading comp questions are best addressed by re-reading a portion of the passage and often the correct answer choice is a paraphrase of the text. Even within the paraphrasing key words will often remain like scientific words and business jargon. Have you been going back to the text when you can? You will know that you should re-read the text if the question stem itself points you to one paragraph. If the question stem is so general that you could return to multiple paragraphs or the entire passage you should start with a process of elimination of the incorrect answer choices. Remember, if you can go back to the text you want to do that.

2) To help you know which paragraph to return to, and to help you comprehend the passage as a whole you should stop at the end of each paragraph and think about what was in that paragraph. I usually write down 6 - 12 words that describe the main idea of the paragraph. This will help fix in your mind what was in each paragraph and will help you to return to the correct paragraph when possible. If you cannot sum up a paragraph take the time to re-read it - it is worth the time.

Do not try to make up time on the actual reading of the passage. Skimming is inappropriate - but as so many others have mentioned on this site - so is reading for detail. Read for the context and the main idea of each paragraph not for the exact number of gallons of water or exact date something happened, etc.

I believe that everyone has the ability to do well on reading comprehension!"

Hope that helps!

Interesting that you notice that pattern with the critical reasoning, it is my strongest point as well and on the last GMATprep i took i got the least amount of these questions...hmmm maybe im being paranoid in thinking the gmat wants me to do worse. Unless they are trying to find your breaking point?

And i cant believe one of your students got 4 back to back, that would be my worst nightmare! Was she scoring extremely well in verbal?

Thanks for the RC tips, they were helpful.