Improvement in Reading Speed and Comprehension (Verbal Ability)

Quite often a CAT aspirant must be wondering as to how one manages to answer so many questions in such a short span of time. There is no doubt that one needs to be very well prepared through regular practice and covering wider and wider range of sample problems. But there is one additional way by which one can help the cause – by improving his speed of reading. This may sound incredible to start with but if we look at the facts, the real picture will emerge.

An average person can read 150 to 200 words in a minute with a comprehension level of 60% by concentrating hard and his performance can be termed satisfactory. According to experts, an average reader is nearly five times slower than a good reader and if we consider reading efficiency, the gap is even wider. Reading efficiency is defined as reading speed multiplied by comprehension rate called efficient words per minute (ewpm). For an average reader, this is typically about 120 ewpm while for top readers this can be as high as 850 ewpm. A reasonably good reader can achieve a reading efficiency of about 300 ewpm – i.e., 2.5 times the speed of an average reader. Let us now examine the impact this has on a person sitting for CAT. The average time taken to read a question by the average reader is 15 – 20 seconds while this will come down to 6 – 8 seconds for s good reader. Thus a person can get nearly 15 minutes extra for answering the entire examination.

It therefore pays to improve the speed of reading. But how does one do it? To start with, you may take a on line test to measure your current status by visiting http://www.readingsoft.com/ or http://www.freereadingtest.com/

There are important areas for improvement like in the areas of Eye movement, Eye span, etc.

Some good tips regarding how to improve your reading speed are available at http://www.mindtools.com/speedrd.html and free software (trial basis) are also available for download at http://www.rocketreader.com/download/RocketReaderDownload.html. There are many websites which help in improvement in English vocabulary, comprehension and reading speed.

By:

Prof. Bikramjit Sen

IIM C Batch 08