Two different approaches to the same 40 minutes, and why picking the wrong one for your brain wastes both.

Most VARC advice boils down to "read more, read daily, build your reading muscle." True, but useless the night before a mock when you're staring at four RC passages wondering where to even start. The more useful question isn't how to read faster, it's how to spend your 40 minutes in an order that actually matches how your brain works, which is basically the first thing CATking's VARC sessions try to get students to figure out about themselves.

Figure Out Which Kind of VARC Person You Are

Some people can read a dense 400-word passage without their eyes glazing over. Others start strong and mentally check out by paragraph three. Neither is wrong, but they need completely different openings to the section.

If RC is genuinely your comfort zone, spend the first 25 minutes there, aim to get through three of the four passages, then use your remaining 15 minutes on Verbal Ability, para-jumbles, odd-one-out, whatever the paper throws at you that day.

If long passages drain you fast, flip it. Split your 40 minutes into a clean 20 plus 20. Spend the first 20 minutes on the VA questions, para-jumbles, odd-one-out, paraphrasing, whatever's on the paper, while your focus is freshest. Then use the next 20 minutes for RC, when your brain still has enough left to actually process two passages properly.

The Quiet Target Nobody Tells You About

Here's the part that changes how VARC feels: you don't need to nail all 24 questions. If you can get 6 out of 8 questions right in the VA section, para summary and the "odd one out" style questions specifically, and then clean up on just one comfortable RC passage, you're already sitting around 10 correct out of 24. With no negative marking on a c*unk of these question types, that alone tends to land you close to the 95th percentile.

That's a very different mental target than "solve the whole paper," and it's a much calmer one to walk into the exam with.

A Warm-Up Trick for When You're Ready to Push Further

Once the basics feel steady, there's a specific drill CATking builds into its mock routine that's worth stealing. Before diving into a full RC passage, summarize just one paragraph first, then attempt two questions off it. Think of it as a warm-up, since an RC passage is really just a chain of paragraph summaries stitched together anyway.

After your brain's had one full passage (you'll feel it, usually around the 15-minute mark), shift gears. Pick two paragraphs and work them as a pair, five to six minutes, whatever score you get, move on. Grab another RC. Round it out with one more odd-one-out or para-summary question, then one final RC. Aiming for 15 to 16 correct out of 24 using this kind of structured rotation is roughly what a 99.99 percentile run looks like.

The Accuracy Conversation Nobody Has About Verbal

There's a separate, slightly more analytical way to think about VARC that's worth layering on top of all this: knowing the difference between what you're confident about and what you're guessing.

In Quant, the instinct is to aim for close to 100% accuracy on whatever you attempt. Verbal doesn't quite work that way. If you're stuck between two options and genuinely can't articulate why one feels more right than the other, that's fine, that's a measured risk, not a random guess. The trick is knowing which of your answers fall into that bucket versus which ones you're actually sure about.

One useful mental exercise, and something CATking's mentors push students to actually track during mocks: split your attempted questions into "confident" and "calculated risk" categories, and log your accuracy on each separately, not as one blended number. If your confident attempts are landing above 90% accuracy and your risk attempts are landing somewhere around 50%, that combination alone can get you to a strong score, roughly 14 correct out of 17 to 18 attempted questions is the kind of ratio that tends to land in the 99th percentile range.

What it can't be is 18 attempts with a roughly 50-50 split of right and wrong. That's not measured risk, that's just guessing, and it won't get you there.

Mocks Lie To You a Little, the Real Exam Usually Doesn't

One thing worth remembering when a mock goes badly: the actual CAT paper tends to be less ambiguous than most mocks. That maddening feeling of being torn between two answer choices, convinced you're right while the answer key disagrees, shows up far more in practice tests than on exam day. An error rate above 50% on a rough mock isn't a sign you're falling apart. It's a mock being a mock. Note it, move on, and don't let one bad sectional convince you the whole strategy is broken.

Whether you build your VARC approach around the RC-first vs VA-first split, the paragraph warm-up drill, or the confident-versus-risk accuracy tracking, the common thread is the same. Verbal ability rewards a plan more than it rewards raw reading speed. It's the same combination CATking students crediting jumps to scores like 98.76 and 99.19 percentile keep pointing back to, not a talent thing, just a plan that matched how they actually read. Pick the version of the plan that fits you, and let the percentile follow.