Charles Chaney’s VR Mastery

1. Charles Chaney’s VR Mastery • Curriculum for Increasing Verbal Reasoning Scores 1

2. Chaney’s VR Strategies • Why do you miss questions? • Do you misread the passage? • Avoid situations where your eyes see what your mind pays no attention to, or when your mind misremembers what your eyes have just seen. • Strategies for helping you catch everything on the page accurately: • Read at a pace at which your eyes and mind are comfortable. • Avoid reading too quickly. • Become an active participatory reader. • Use clutch reading strategies. 2

3. Chaney’s VR Strategies • Why do you miss questions? • Do you run out of time? • Avoid panicking and then reading too fast. • Give your mind a chance to absorb the material. • Pace yourself through careful, deliberate practice and monitoring of your comfortable reading speed. • Proper pacing. • 8 ½ minutes per passage for seven passages. • Keep in mind there will likely be two relatively easy passages, three moderately challenging passages and two difficult passages. • Balance time accordingly—9-10 minutes for the difficult passages. • Memorize this pacing guide: 60, 51, 43, 34, 26, 17 and 9. • Plan on three minutes reading and five minutes answering the questions. 3

4. Chaney’s VR Strategies • Why do you miss questions? • Do you run out of time? • Do NOT waste too much time on any one question. • Resist the temptation of reading a question more than once. • It’s not a bad idea to read each answer choice twice, however. • Re-reading material is the number one clock killer for VR test takers. 4

5. Chaney’s VR Strategies • Why do you miss questions? • Do you misread the question stem? • Don’t skip key words without realizing it. • Deliberately slow down when reading the question stems. • Be sure to fully grasp each word in the question stem and comprehend its meaning. • The three-question test: • What is this question really asking? • Where did I read about this in the passage? • Why is this question interesting? • Consider the questions as mini-puzzles to be solved. 5

6. Chaney’s VR Strategies • Why do you miss questions? • Do you misread the answer choices? • Don’t skip key words without realizing it. • Deliberately slow down when reading the answer choices. • Be sure to fully grasp each word in the question stem and comprehend its meaning. • After reading the answer choices, skim answers A through D to confirm your understanding. 6

7. Chaney’s VR Strategies • Why do you miss questions? • Do you misinterpret the passage? • Create a mental dialogue by asking the right questions as you read. • Ask various questions about the author of the passage. • Consider questions critics of the passage might ask. • Ask various questions about the passage itself, especially how it’s organized and arranged. 7

8. Chaney’s VR Strategies • Why do you miss questions? • Do you misinterpret the question? • Don’t allow your focus to lapse after you complete the passage. • Practice reading questions from test passages as much as possible. • Analyze the mistakes you make to identify and correct bad habits and tendencies. • Be much more cognizant of the connotations of words in the question. • Overlooking or misunderstanding even a single word in the question most likely results in missing the question and answering incorrectly. 8

9. Chaney’s VR Strategies • Why do you miss questions? • Do you have low reading confidence? • Insecure test takers often struggle with reading pacing, comprehension and answering questions because of doubt and the fear/anxiety stemming from it. • What can you do to build confidence? • Extensive practice and being comfortable with the test builds confidence. • A positive attitude through positive visualization techniques can help as well. 9

10. Chaney’s VR Strategies • Why do you miss questions? • Do you bring outside ideas and bias into your answers? • Correct answers on the VR reflect information provided by the accompanying passage only. • Be very wary of passages addressing topics with which you have some knowledge or an opinion. 10