I’ve taken on a handful of awesome new ACT students over the past few months. For each, we develop a Target Score, specific to them, which we study towards (this is the number that can gain them an admission letter to their top-pick colleges without making them study or take the test ad infinitum!). Obviously, my bespoke test prep strategy is different for each of these students, because increasing by 7 ACT composite points vs. 3 ACT composite points call for very different study roadmaps.
But do you know which strategy seems to ALWAYS help my clients get a lot closer to their target ACT scores….no matter HOW many points they’re aiming to improve by? It’s my concise but crucial hack for the Double Passage (or “Paired Passage”) in the ACT’s Reading section!
In fact, if a student only needs to increase their ACT Reading score by answering 3-5 more questions correctly (and thereby raise their ACT Reading section score anywhere from 2 to 5 points!), the strategy outlined below in this post is the ONLY change they need to make to get there!
This really is quite remarkable. Increasing the ACT Reading section score by much more than that usually requires us to completely overhaul the way a student even approaches reading a passage on the ACT! (…which takes considerably more work, but is ultimately worth the effort. I DO have my tried-and-true methods up my sleeve, but it takes time to figure out which one(s) is best for each particular high schooler!)
So….whaddya say? Is it time to learn this watertight strategy that will substantially raise your ACT Reading score while also saving you precious time on the test? I thought so! But first, you need to understand some context…
ARTICLE CONTENTS
1. How is the ACT Reading section structured?
2. What are double passages on the ACT?
3. The wrong way to approach paired passages
4. The right way to approach paired passages
5. Conclusion
How is the ACT Reading section structured?
Every ACT Reading section consists of 4 different passages, each with 10 corresponding questions.
These passages DO have some predictability to them. In particular, they’ll ALWAYS be presented to you in this order:
Fiction (“Literary Narrative”)
Social Science
Humanities, and
Natural Science
Because the length of the section is 35 minutes for a regular time test taker, you should spend an average of 8:45 (8 minutes and 45 seconds) or less on each passage and its 10 questions. Multiply that by 1.5 if you get extended time, or by 2 if you get double time.
Still with me?
Now, 3 of these 4 passages will be long, single passages. This means that you’ll read approximately a whole two-column page of writing, accompanied by 10 questions.
However, what about that fourth passage? Why, that one isn’t a “single” passage at all! That’s what we call a “Double Passage” or a “Paired Passage.”
You won’t know ahead of time WHICH of the four passage types will be a Double Passage; it could fall into the category of Fiction or Social Science or Humanities or Natural Science. But if you understand how this type of passage is structured, and use my trademark strategy, you’ll be able to get all the questions correct, regardless of WHERE it crops up within the ACT Reading section!
Questions about two passages on the ACT
The Double Passage in the ACT Reading section gives you about the same amount of actual reading to do as the other passages, but it’s organized differently:
You have TWO passages to read (“Passage A” and “Passage B”);
Each of the two passages will be about HALF the length of a regular, single passage. Think: roughly one full column of text on a page instead of both columns of text on a page.
The accompanying questions are organized into three sections: questions about Passage A ONLY, questions about Passage B ONLY, and then questions about BOTH passages. Here’s a sample layout of these questions:
Each of these 3 question sections will have roughly 3-4 questions total in it. (I have seen past tests in which there were 5 “Passage A ONLY” questions, 2 “Passage B ONLY” questions, and then 3 questions about BOTH, so be prepared for some slight variation!)
There’s a tricky new twist as of September 2023: sometimes these questions WILL be explicitly labeled with a little box telling you which passage they correspond to (Passage A, etc.)…but sometimes they WON’T! Instead, all 10 questions will just all be listed out in one undifferentiated block. THAT SAID, the questions will still be presented IN ORDER! (Qs about Passage A only —> Qs about Passage B only —> Qs about Passages A and B.)
The wrong way to approach double passages
Most of my private tutoring clients come to me pulling their hair out with frustration over Paired Passage Qs…and getting most of these questions wrong AND running out of time in the process!
What are they doing before I transform their approach? Simple: they do all the reading FIRST, and then they answer all the questions SECOND.
But you see, that isn’t a very efficient approach to the Paired ACT Reading Passage. Here’s why:
The student reads Passage A. Then they read Passage B, which causes them to FORGET what they just learned in Passage A and/or conflate/combine the two passages in their brains!
Then, they start answering questions…only, the first questions to come up are the “Passage A ONLY” questions! Uh oh. They’ve already FORGOTTEN what happened in Passage A! The last thing they read was Passage B! Guess they’d better go back to Passage A to remind themselves of what it was about. Good luck getting all those questions correct.
Now, they start answering the “Passage B ONLY” questions…only they’ve now forgotten what Passage B was even talking about! Or worse, they’re confusing its content with the content of Passage A. Now there’s MORE re-reading to do and wrong answers to bubble in.
Now they have to answer the questions about BOTH passages, which requires them to understand exactly how the two passages were alike and different. Unfortunately, most students who start this way will have both passages completely jumbled in their heads and will likely get these very wrong…AND waste a ton of precious time in the process!
Don’t be ashamed if that’s exactly the approach you’ve been taking in the past. It’s the intuitive approach...it just happens not to be the right one. But now you’re going to learn the secret that will be your salvation!
The best ACT Paired Passage Strategy
1) Read the blurb.
Read the little introductory blurb before Passage A even begins. This will help you understand the time period, the topic and even the relationship between Passages A and B.
2) Read Passage A
Read Passage A in its entirety. If you incorporate a specific reading strategy to do that, great! If you don’t know what I’m talking about by “specific reading strategy,” then just read the passage like you would read anything else.
3) Answer “Passage A ONLY” Questions
While Passage A is fresh in your mind, skip to the first set of questions that are about Passage A only, and answer all of them. Finish these before moving on. As I’ve noted above, though these questions may not be explicitly labeled “Passage A,” you’ll be able to tell from their content that they’re asking about that first passage.
So whether or not the questions are labeled, your winning strategy remains the same: read the first passage, then start answering questions from the beginning. When you finally get to a question that is NOT about the first passage, time to move on to reading the next passage.
4) Read Passage B
Read Passage B in its entirety, using whatever “reading strategy” (or not!) that you normally use.
5) Answer “Passage B ONLY” Questions
Now skip to the second grouping of questions, and answer ALL of them! They will be about Passage B and only about Passage B, which is the passage you just read and have fresh in your mind!
When you start hitting questions that are about both passages, content-wise, move on to the next step:
6) Answer “BOTH” Questions
Since you’ve treated each mini-passage separately and worked through its questions, you’ll actually understand both Passage A and Passage B better than you would have if you’d read them both at the beginning! Now that they are CLEAR and SEPARATE in you mind, you’ll have virtually no difficulty answering the remaining set of questions, all of which refer to BOTH passages! If you’re lucky, you might not even need to look back at the passages, though if you do, that’s totally fine.
Conclusion
See, that wasn’t so bad, right? If you’re like my ACT private tutoring students, you’ll find that simply re-shuffling the order in which you approach this genre of question will IMMEDIATELY raise your ACT Reading score while saving you time! That’s valuable time you just can’t afford to waste in re-reading on a test as fast-paced as the ACT.
And depending on how far you needed to improve your Reading score to reach your ultimate goals, it’s possible that this is the ONLY change you’d need to make to get your Reading section score in line with your Target Score! If that’s you, woo-hoo! You’re almost there!
Did you like what you read in this post? Are you thirsty for MORE cutting-edge strategies? Hacks like these—along with personalized test prep plans—are how I’ve dramatically raised the SAT and ACT scores of students around the globe for over a dozen years! If you want my expertise in your corner, you can learn about working with me one-on-one here.
And if you’re more of a lone wolf when it comes to studying? I have JUST the solution for you, too: my new online ACT Reading course that you can binge (or watch) at your own pace! Check out The Ultimate ACT Reading Guide here.
