It's not about reading faster. It's about knowing which order to attack the paper in.

Most CAT aspirants treat VARC like a mystery box. You sit down, open the section, and solve whatever's in front of you in whatever order it appears. Some days that works. Most days it doesn't, and you walk out of the mock not entirely sure why your score swung ten percentile points from the last one.

A CATking VARC mentor who has spent the last 17 years teaching verbal ability (and picked up quant on and off for four of those years too) makes a simple point: everyone's brain processes reading differently, so there isn't one correct sequence for the VARC section. There are three, and which one works for you depends on whether long reading comprehension passages energize you or put you to sleep.

If RC is your comfort zone

If you've read English since childhood and long passages don't wear you down, front-load the section. Spend the first 25 minutes purely on RC and try to get through three of the four passages. Whatever time is left, usually around 15 minutes, goes into the verbal ability questions: para-jumbles, para-summary, odd-one-out, and whatever else the paper setters throw in that year. It's a straightforward technique, but it only works if RC genuinely doesn't drain you, because you're betting most of your 40 minutes on it.

The 20-20 split, for everyone else

This is the one built for the more common problem: you start an RC, get through a paragraph and a half, and your focus is already gone. For this group, the advice is to break the 40-minute section cleanly in half. The first 20 minutes go entirely to the non-RC verbal ability questions, para-summary, para-jumble, odd-one-out, and any variant CAT decides to add that year. The second 20 minutes go to two RCs.

The target here isn't perfection. It's getting 6 out of the 8 verbal ability questions right, since these question types don't carry negative marking. Pair that with one RC solved well, and you're looking at roughly 10 correct answers out of 24 in the section with zero penalty for the ones you didn't attempt carefully. That combination, done consistently, is enough to land you close to the 95th percentile.

For students who've already fallen in love with mocks

The third approach is aimed at people who've been grinding mocks for a while and are chasing something closer to a 99th-plus percentile finish. It starts with a single para-summary as a warm-up, treating it as a miniature RC since, as the logic goes, an RC is really just a string of paragraph-level summaries stacked together. From there you move straight into a full RC. Once that's done, you pick up two para-jumbles and knock them out in a tight 5 to 6 minute window, then move to another RC. The pattern repeats: a short VA block, then an RC, alternating instead of clumping everything of one type together.

The stated bar for this strategy is 15 to 16 correct answers out of 24, which is what typically separates a 99.9 percentile finish from a good-but-not-great one.

What ties all three together is the same advice: don't guess which one fits you, test it. Run five sectional mocks, rotate between the strategies, and track your accuracy under each one. The strategy that survives that testing, not the one that sounds cleverest on paper, is the one worth committing to on exam day.

In the same video, several CATking VARC students share the percentiles they eventually landed, spanning the mid-90s all the way up past 99.8. The range itself is the point: there's no single "correct" VARC score to chase, only the strategy that gets you closest to your own ceiling.