SAT/ACT Reading: Should I look at the questions first?

Many students struggle with the SAT/ACT Reading section because of the challenging passages, tricky answer choices, and limited time to read and answer the questions.

The reading section is all about having the best strategies, learning from your errors, and practicing to perfect your use of the strategies. One common strategy question is whether students should read the questions first before reading the passage.

The SAT gives you 65 minutes to read five passages and answer 52 multiple-choice questions. I recommend that students take no more than 12 minutes to reach each passage and the questions about it before moving to the next passage so that they have at least five minutes at the end to check work and go back to questions they were not sure about.

The ACT gives you 35 minutes to read four passages and answer 40 multiple-choice questions. While the time per question is much less than the SAT, the difficulty of the passages and questions are generally easier. I recommend that students take no more than 8 minutes to read each passage and answer the questions about it.

Some students try to save time on the reading section by reading the questions first. The idea behind this strategy is that by knowing what the questions ask for, students will be able to look for that information in the passage while reading and answer more quickly when they come back to the questions.

The main advantages of this strategy are that it can help you stay focused while you read the passage and save time by skipping unrelated information. The main disadvantages are that looking at the questions beforehand causes selective reading, which may cause you to miss main points and important context. Most of the questions relate to the main ideas of the passage, so you may struggle with the questions if you attempt selective reading.

Most students who achieve high scores in the reading section succeed by reading the passage before the questions rather than using this strategy. While there are some questions related to individual lines in the passage, the bulk of the questions pertain to the main ideas of the passage. Even with questions related to individual lines, it is important to understand the context in order to get those types of questions correct.

Often, selective reading for questions causes students to miss important ideas and context, which leads to selecting answers that look correct but actually have something wrong with them. By reading the passage first, you will get a clear picture of the author’s tone, purpose, and perspective. Regardless of the question type, having the context and knowing the main ideas will ensure you have the information needed to answer the questions correctly.