Why practicing more RCs is harmful for your preparation

There is one piece of advice in the CAT world that almost everyone repeats, and it is this: solve one RC a day. You have heard it from teachers, from toppers, and on every forum you have ever opened. But have you ever stopped to ask why it is one, and not three, or five, or ten? Nobody ever tells you to solve five RCs every day the way they happily tell you to solve fifty quant questions. It is always one, calm and steady, like eating a single apple in the morning. And most students quietly assume that the number is just a gentle suggestion, a soft minimum they are free to beat. So they beat it. They do four, they do five, and they feel proud of the effort. But that number is not lazy advice and it is not a floor to jump over. There is a reason it is one, and it is a strong one, and once you understand it, you will never again feel proud of doing more passages than the student sitting next to you.

The first damage that volume does is quiet and psychological: it trains you to skim. Think about what actually happens when you sit down with four passages to finish before dinner. You reach a paragraph you did not fully understand, and you feel the clock, and you have three more passages still waiting, so you do the one thing you cannot afford to do. You move on. You tell yourself you got the gist. And you do this again and again, until skimming stops being a shortcut you take under pressure and becomes the only way you know how to read. Now here is the part people miss. In quant, rushing actually helps you, because in quant you either know a concept or you do not, so speed either builds or you get honestly stuck. When you simply can not move forward in a question, the only thing you can do is go and learn the thing first. But verbal has no list of concepts to know. There is nothing to look up. And there is no getting stuck either - in RC, you have to choose one of the four options, so never get stuck the way you do in Quants. You pick one and you get it wrong.

RC has only one concept - how deeply you understood the passage in front of you decides how correctly you answer the questions, and when you rush five of them just to hit a number, the only thing you are training yourself for is a shallower and shallower read. Which is the exact opposite of what your whole preparation is supposed to be building.

The second damage is even worse, because it robs you of the only part of RC that ever taught anyone anything. Here is a thing that took me years to start saying out loud to students: the learning in RC does not happen while you read the passage, it happens afterwards. It happens when you go back and work out why option B looked so reasonable that you nearly picked it, and which single line, sometimes a single word, sometimes even a single letter, is the thing that quietly kills it. It happens when you ask what the author was really doing in that difficult paragraph, and not just what it roughly said. And all of that takes longer than reading the passage did in the first place. So think this over: do you actually have time to do this analysis? Well, the student who is doing only one passage does. The student doing five can never have that much time. He finishes his fifth, feels the day was productive, and shuts the book, having done all the reading and skipped the only step that turns reading into learning.

Consider my own example - When I was preparing for CAT and my teacher taught me this, I used to spend one hour on each RC passage's analysis. One hour! The outcome was: I began with 50% accuracy and reached 100 in only 3 weeks. It turns out you only need 21 RC passages to score 98 percentile in CAT's verbal section.

So look at what the volume student has managed to do, all in one sitting. He has built a bad habit, and in the same breath he has skipped the exact step that might have fixed it. That is not simply wasted effort, and I want you to feel the difference, because it matters. Wasted effort leaves you where you started. This leaves you worse. This is moving backwards while your body and your logbook both keep telling you that you are working hard, and that is the cruelest part of it, because it feels like progress. It feels responsible. And so it can go on for months, sometimes a whole year, without the student or anyone around him noticing that the number of questions kept going up while the score stood completely still or in some cases, actually went down.

Let me tell you about a student I taught about four years ago, because he made all of this real for me in a way no theory of mine ever could. He had a strange and painful problem. He had already attempted CAT twice, and by then he was a genuine 98 percentiler in both quant and LRDI, which is not something that happens by fluke. And yet his VARC sat somewhere between 70 and 80, throughout the year, and he could not understand why. So I asked him how much RC practice he had done. The answer stopped me. More than a thousand passages over three years. TIME, IMS, CL, Arun Sharma, you name the material and he had finished it. A thousand passages, and his accuracy was still stuck around fifty percent, which is roughly what you get by understanding half and guessing the rest. So I gave him one instruction that must have sounded almost insulting after all that work. I told him - stop solving so many RCs. But keep the two hours. Spend the same time you always did, except now put all of it into a single passage instead of three or four. Guess what, he couldn't do it. He had trained his entire system to be so number obsessed that after just 3 days, he started getting anxiety - FOMO, you may say. And he went back to the old habit of solving 4-5 a day. Needless to tell you - he cracked CAT but could not clear the VARC sectional even in the third attempt.

So here is what practising RC the right way actually looks like, and it is almost boringly simple. You take one passage. You read it at whatever speed understanding honestly demands, and if that speed is slow, then it is slow, and you make your peace with that. Then you do the part that everyone skips. You spend longer on the review than you spent on the reading. Read the entire passage again to see if your comprehension was incomplete the first time. Go through every single option, one by one, and why it tempted you, and the exact words in the text that rule it out. Not a vague sense of why. The actual words.

Because more passages only ever give you more data that you are never going to look at, and data you do not study is not practice, it is just noise you paid for with your time. One passage, genuinely understood, quietly changes the way you read the next one. And that, in all my years of watching this exam, is the only thing that has ever moved a VARC score. Not the thousandth passage. The first one you truly read.