UCAT verbal reasoning — am I running out of time because I'm reading too much?
I've been prepping for the UCAT for about 7 weeks and verbal reasoning is consistently my worst section. I'm finishing maybe 60% of the questions in the allotted time and I know the issue is that I'm reading the passages too thoroughly before answering. My scores on the questions I do answer are around 68% correct, which is decent, but the unanswered ones are killing my scaled score.
I've tried the read-questions-first approach but it actually slows me down more because I end up re-reading the passage anyway. I'm getting about a 580 scaled score right now and I need to be closer to 650+ to feel competitive for the programmes I'm targeting. The gap feels enormous when I look at the question volume I'm not reaching.
Decision making and quantitative reasoning feel more manageable — I'm hitting roughly 640 and 660 on those consistently. Abstract reasoning is inconsistent, ranging from 600 to 680 depending on the day. It's really verbal that's anchoring my overall score and I have about 5 weeks left before my test date.
580 to 650+ in 5 weeks is achievable if you do timed practice every single day. The improvement in VR comes almost entirely from building automatic recognition of what to look for, not from studying content or general reading speed.
I was in a similar position a few months ago. The thing that helped most was flagging and moving on — I'd give a question 40 seconds max and if I wasn't close, I'd flag and guess rather than sink 90 seconds into it and lose the next two questions entirely.
The shift that worked for me was treating VR as a true/false/can't tell exercise and nothing else. Stop trying to understand the passage — just scan for the specific claim in the question. It feels wrong at first but it's the right approach for the time constraints.
Also worth tracking where you're losing time at the question level. Some passages are just dense and not worth fighting — getting 2 quick questions from an easy passage beats spending 3 minutes on a hard one and getting 2 answers anyway.