A Four-Week Reading Plan
Four weeks is enough to change how you read this section, but only if the four weeks are different from each other. Here is what each one is for.
Why the weeks have to differ
The default plan is to do a reading test, mark it, feel briefly informed, and repeat until the exam. It produces a flat line. Four sections done the same way teach you the same thing four times, and what they teach is your current score rather than how to change it.
A plan that works has a shape. Week one finds out what is actually wrong, which almost nobody knows at the start. Week two fixes the mechanics of the parts that are failing. Week three puts the mechanics under a clock. Week four stops adding anything and consolidates.
The rule that holds it together: what you do in week one should look nothing like what you do in week four. If your last week looks like your first, the plan was not a plan.
Budget four to five hours a week. More than that produces fatigue rather than improvement, and reading is a skill where a tired hour is worth close to nothing.
Week one: diagnose, do not improve
Start with one full timed reading section, done properly: 39 minutes, four parts, no pausing, no looking anything up. The score matters less than what it is made of.
Then review in the way that produces information. For every wrong answer, before rereading the passage, write one line naming what went wrong: answered the adjacent question, lost the attribution, answered the blank from the second text, overspent and rushed the rest, ran out of time entirely. Rereading first buries the cause under a story about difficulty.
Do two more timed single parts during the week, chosen to be different from each other, and review them the same way. By the end of week one you should have fifteen to twenty labelled errors, and one or two labels will dominate.
Also record two numbers per attempt: which question you were on when the timer hit half, and how many questions were unanswered at the end. Those two numbers separate a pacing problem from an accuracy problem, and the rest of the plan depends on knowing which you have.
Resist the urge to start fixing things this week. A fix applied before the diagnosis is usually a fix for somebody else's problem.
Week two: mechanics, untimed
This is the only week where untimed work is correct, and it is correct because you are changing a procedure rather than practising one.
Take the one or two error labels that dominated week one and work only on those. If attribution dominated, do four Part 4 articles with no clock at all, building a ledger on each one and checking after every question whether the ledger would have answered it. If blanks dominated, do four sets of reply or comment blanks, and for every blank write down the line in the source text that forces it.
Do the opening moves as separate drills, disconnected from any question. Take five Part 3 passages and do nothing but the one minute map: four topic labels, then stop. Take five Part 2 charts and do nothing but the discriminator grid: what does each option have that the others do not. Ten minutes each, and they make the opening automatic, which is the only state in which it survives a timer.
Expect to feel slower this week. You are doing extra steps deliberately, and the payoff is in week three when the steps stop costing anything.
Label every wrong answer before rereading the passage. Rereading first produces a story about why the question was hard, which is exactly the information that hides the real cause.
Week three: mechanics under the clock
Now put a timer on single parts, one at a time, at the real budget: 10 minutes for a Part 1, 8 for a Part 2, 9 for a Part 3, 12 for a Part 4.
Single parts are the right unit here because they are cheap. You get the same pacing information as a full section in a quarter of the time, and you can repeat the part that is failing rather than the three that are fine. Do six to eight of them across the week, weighted toward your weakest part.
The thing being tested this week is whether the week two habits survive contact with a clock. They often do not at first: the ledger gets abandoned three paragraphs in, the discriminator grid gets skipped because the chart looks simple. When that happens, do the part again the next day rather than moving on. A habit that collapses under time is not yet a habit.
Add one full timed section at the end of the week to check that the parts still work in sequence, and review it with the same error labelling. Compare the labels with week one. The dominant label should have moved, and if it has not, the week two work was aimed at the wrong thing.
Week four: consolidate and stop adding
Nothing new goes in this week. The aim is to arrive at the test doing reliably what you can already do, which is a different goal from improving and needs a different week.
Two full timed sections, spaced a few days apart, both at the time of day your test is scheduled for. Review both, but lightly: confirm which errors are still appearing rather than starting new projects. If one part is still clearly weakest, two or three single timed parts on it is the limit of new work this week.
Spend the rest of the time on the things that are cheap and durable. Rehearse the four opening moves until you could say them in your sleep. Rehearse the end-of-part routine: thirty seconds left, fill every empty box, then improve the closest one. Keep reading fifteen minutes a day of ordinary Canadian prose, which maintains fluency without generating any pressure.
The last two days should contain no full sections at all. One short part to stay warm, a reread of your own error labels, and then stop. Fatigue on test day costs more than a final practice test can add.
Use single timed parts rather than full sections for the middle two weeks. Same pacing information at a quarter of the cost, and you can repeat the part that is actually failing.
What to stop doing, and when
Some activities are useful in week one and harmful by week four, and knowing when to drop them is most of what separates a plan from a habit.
Untimed practice. Correct in week two, when you are building a procedure. By week three it teaches a pace you will not have, and by week four it is actively misleading.
Reviewing by rereading the passage. Useful early, when you may genuinely have misunderstood something. By week three the passages are rarely the problem, and rereading them produces the comfortable conclusion that the question was unfair.
Full sections. Valuable at the start for diagnosis and at the end for rehearsal, and a poor use of the middle two weeks. A full section costs 39 minutes plus review and gives you four passages; four single parts cost the same and let you repeat the one that is failing.
Vocabulary lists. Marginal at any point for this section, and by week four a distraction. The words that cost marks here are ordinary words in unexpected senses, which lists do not contain.
If you have less than four weeks
Compress by dropping week two rather than week one. Diagnosis is the step that makes the others efficient, and skipping it means practising whichever thing you happen to believe is wrong.
With two weeks: one timed section and two single parts with full error labelling in the first three days, then straight to timed single parts weighted at your dominant error, then one full section three days before the test.
With one week, do not try to change how you read. Learn the four per-part budgets, learn the four opening moves, rehearse the end-of-part filling routine, and do three or four timed single parts to make those automatic. That is a genuine mark or two, and it is available in a week, which is more than can be said for reading rate or vocabulary.
If a new habit collapses under the clock, repeat that part the next day instead of moving on. A procedure that only works untimed is not yet a procedure.
Practise it
Five questions on sequencing four weeks of preparation so that each one does something the others do not.