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How to improve LSAT reading comprehension: not by skimming, which costs more time than it saves through repeated returns to the text. Read for what each paragraph does, mark every voice shift, and run the two-sentence summary drill after every passage before you touch a question.
No. Skimming is the most common response to an RC timing problem and it makes the timing problem worse, because it produces a read you cannot answer questions from and forces you back into the passage repeatedly.
The time is not lost in the read. It is lost in the four or five returns to the text that a shallow read makes necessary, each of which costs relocating yourself in a dense passage under pressure.
So the target is not faster reading. It is a read that answers more questions without going back, which usually means reading slightly slower and thinking about structure while you do it.
Three changes, in order of how much they pay. Most people attempt them in the reverse order.
ChangeWhat it meansWhy it paysRead for what each paragraph doesOne verb per paragraph: introduces, objects, concedes, resolvesAnswers main point, function and attitude questions without returning to the textMark every voice shiftBracket where a view belongs to someone other than the authorPrevents the single most common RC error, attributing a described view to the authorPredict before reading choicesSay the answer in your own words firstThe same discipline that works in Logical Reasoning, and it transfers directly
After each passage, before looking at a single question, write two sentences. One says what the passage is about and what tension it addresses. The other says what the author thinks and how strongly.
Then answer the questions. Then compare your two sentences against the main point and author attitude answers.
When your sentences reliably match, RC has been solved for you and you can stop drilling it. That usually takes twenty to thirty passages, which is a smaller investment than most people make and a better-directed one.
Because comprehension under time pressure is not primarily a rate problem, and because the feeling that you are reading too slowly is unreliable evidence.
Students routinely misjudge which methods are working. In Deslauriers and colleagues (2019), PNAS (https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1821936116), active-learning students rated their own learning 0.56 standard deviations lower while scoring 0.46 standard deviations higher. The method that felt worse was the one that worked.
Structural reading feels slower and worse. You finish a passage holding fewer facts than a careful reader, which is uncomfortable, and then you answer the questions faster because you know where everything is.
Read the first and last sentence of the difficult paragraph and name its verb from those alone. Do not reread the interior. A paragraph you cannot follow still has a job in the argument, and the job is usually visible from its edges.
Then keep going. The commonest way to lose an RC section is to spend three minutes on the hardest paragraph of the hardest passage and arrive at the fourth passage with six minutes left.
If a detail question later needs that paragraph, you will return to it with the question in hand, which is a far more efficient read than the one you were attempting.
Less volume, more spacing. Spaced practice produced 47.3 percent correct against 36.7 percent massed across the meta-analytic record, with 259 of 271 comparisons favoring spacing, per Cepeda and colleagues (2006), Psychological Bulletin (https://www.yorku.ca/ncepeda/publications/CPVWR2006.pdf).
One passage a day with the summary drill beats four passages on a Sunday, and it is a smaller commitment. The spacing does work the volume cannot.
Review at a delay too. The testing effect reaches g = 0.69 when review comes a day or more after the attempt against g = 0.41 under a day, per Rowland (2014), Psychological Bulletin (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25150680/).
Every LSAC figure on this page was taken from LSAC's own pages and last checked on July 26, 2026. Prices, dates and policies move without notice, so the source link sits next to each number rather than in a bibliography at the bottom.
Where LSAC has not published something, this page says so in those words rather than filling the hole with a plausible number. That is the difference between a gap and a guess, and only one of them is safe to plan around.
No. Skimming produces a read you cannot answer from, which forces repeated returns to the text and costs more time than the slower read would have.
Read for what each paragraph does rather than what it says, mark every shift into someone else's viewpoint, and predict answers before reading the choices.
After each passage, before any question, write one sentence on the topic and tension and one on the author's position. Then check them against the main point and attitude answers.
Roughly three to four minutes on a standard passage. If you are faster than that and rereading during the questions, the read was not doing its job.
One, spaced, beats four in a block. Spaced practice produced 47.3 percent correct against 36.7 percent massed across Cepeda and colleagues, with 259 of 271 comparisons favoring spacing.
Written by Ali, Georgetown Law, founder of Lovare Institut.
August 5, 2026
August 5, 2026