A suggestion for getting through Critical Reading passages faster

The more time I spend tutoring, the more I become aware of the need for flexibility in my approach. The truth is that no one technique will work for everyone, and rigidly insisting on a strategy that simply doesnt make sense to a student is likely a recipe for a disaster. I once got fired from a tutoring company because I refused to stick to its script, and although I was initially upset about losing the work, I realized that the job never would have worked out anyway.   People think too differently, (mis)interpret things in too many ways, and have too many quirks for a one-size-fits-all approach to be effective and if Ive learned one thing from all this tutoring, its that you can basically *never* assume that someone will automatically understand a passage or sentence or turn of phrase in the way the SAT requires them to understand it. I think that a lot of Critical Reading prep is ineffective because its based on the assumption that people will of course be able to understand the literal meaning of the passage with relatively little effort. While Ive certainly worked with plenty of students who do fall into this category (and for whom test prep essentially consists of being reminded endlessly to slow down, work methodically through the questions, and go back to the passage to check out the answers), I think that they are the exceptions rather than the rule. Most people who are capable of understanding exactly not just approximately what the passages are saying and of nailing the main point on their own will typically score in the 650+ range with little to no prep, but needless to say, the average CR score is nowhere near 650 (its actually about 150 points lower). Anyway, I digress. The point Im attempting to make is that if you 1) are a slow reader who just cant seem to finish CR sections in time, and 2) dont always fully understand what the passages are saying, then reading the passage, trying the main point, and only then looking at the questions might not be the best strategy for you sometimes. It might work on the shorter passages, but on the longer ones and especially on Passage 1/Passage 2 its just going to be way too time consuming. Youll get confused an bogged down and start to panic, then slow down even more. Now, I am *not* going to suggest you read the questions first if you do that, youre almost certainly going to miss important contextual pieces of information when you go back to the passage, and because youll only have a partial view of things, youll overlook answers that would otherwise be much more straightforward. What I am going to suggest, however, is a compromise, namely that you answer the questions  while  you read the passage . So you read, say, the first paragraph and answer perhaps the first question, maybe the second. The you read another short chunk, answer the next question or two, and so on. If it helps you to look ahead at the line numbers in the next couple of questions before you read, just to give yourself a sense of how far you need to go in order to be able to answer, by all means do so, but try not to avoid reading the question itself you wont approach the passage with a clear mind, and you risk being so focused on the question that you cant actually absorb what the author is saying. If you need to focus on the detail questions first and skip over the big picture ones until youve finished the passage, thats fine. In fact, youll probably have to work this way. But doing the detail questions first will allow you to get to more questions than you might be able to otherwise you also wont be sacrificing questions you could answer in order to spend time pondering questions youre really not sure about. And the more you see that you can actually finish sections in time, the calmer youll be approaching the test. Note, however, that this is simply a strategy for getting yourself to answer more questions more quickly it doesnt mean that you can just coast. The answers to many questions are still unlikely to be in the actual lines given, and you may still have to go back and read above and below in order to determine the answer.  Transitions, interesting punctuation, and strong language are still of utmost importance. So is trying to get a general sense of what the answer might be before you look at the choices (or, at the very least, immediately eliminating all answers that dont make sense in context). But if you keep these things in mind and break the passage/questions into small, manageable bits, you might find that things get a lot easier.