What Is the Speed Reading Test?
The speed reading test is a type of a verbal reasoning aptitude test that measures your reading speed in alignment with your comprehension. In other words, it measures your aptitude for reading quickly while maintaining an understanding of what you’re reading. You may be able to read quickly, but being able to comprehend texts at a decent speed is a valuable skill to potential employers. The speed reading test essentially measures how effective you are when it comes to reviewing job-related documents in terms of how quickly and accurately you can ingest information that is given to you.
What Should I Expect From the Speed Reading Test?
While this exam can come in varying formats, you can gain a general idea of what to expect. Typically, you will be given an online passage and asked to click a button when you’ve finished reading the passage. Once you’ve done this, the passage will disappear and a series of comprehension questions will be presented to you.
The test is graded on the scale of your reading speed (measured in WPM, or words per minute) in approximation to your comprehension level (how many questions you got correct). For example, let’s say you’re given a 400 word passage. You finish reading the passage in 90 seconds, then answer 4 out of the 5 comprehension questions correctly. This means you read the passage at 266 WPM with a comprehension rate of 80%. 250-300 WPM is the average reading rate for fluent English speakers, so you would’ve scored average with a high comprehension rate. Now, this hypothetical score is based on one passage–in the actual speed reading test, you will complete several passages. Both your WPM and comprehension rate scores will be averaged amongst all of your completed passages to result in a final score. The table below gives an example scorecard for a person who completed 4 passages (scores are typically rounded).
| Passage Number |
WPM |
Comprehension Rate |
| Passage 1 |
266 |
80% |
| Passage 2 |
320 |
80% |
| Passage 3 |
400 |
50% |
| Passage 4 |
300 |
75% |
| Final scores: |
322 |
71% |
If we take a closer look at our example scorecard, we can see that the test taker consistently had a high comprehension rate when their WPM stayed around 300. They did read Passage 3 at a rate of 400 WPM, but their comprehension rate suffered. While reading quickly is a great skill, you don’t want to read so quickly that you don’t comprehend what you just read.
How to Prepare for the Speed Reading Test?
To reiterate, the speed reading test measures how well you can comprehend a text while reading quickly. Habitual reading (without comprehension questions) is a great way to passively increase your reading skills, but here are some tips you can follow while reading to improve your comprehension skills.
One of the things you can do is called annotation, or the process of taking notes while you read. It may sound silly, but pausing while you’re reading even to take simple notes can go a long way in aiding your comprehension due to the annotations forcing you to really think about what you’re reading. While you can use fictional texts for practice, using nonfiction articles that include numerical data is better. The speed reading test usually presents you with the same types of articles! Below are some questions you can use to help guide your practice annotations:
- What data being presented to me is crucial to understanding what this article is trying to say?
- What’s a general summary of this article?
- Is there an argument being given, or is it informative?
- If there is an argument, what is the argument and how is it being supported?
Try coming up with some of your own questions to use as guides in your personal annotations. This tip will help you prepare to answer the comprehension questions! Also keep in mind that speed reading tests may ask you to identify numerical values given in the source text, such as years, percentages, and other forms of number-based data in the questions. Be sure to take note of important numbers and create a habit of recognizing them as well as their significance when reading.
Another thing you can do to aid in your preparation for the speed reading test is to time yourself while reading. To do this, find a few online articles and select passages from them. Try to keep your selections between 200-1000 words. Then, set a timer and see how quickly you can read through your selections while maintaining comprehension! To keep an eye on how well you’re retaining the information you’re reading, answer the above annotation questions for each passage you read without looking at the source material. When you’re finished answering the questions, look back at your passage to test yourself and ask yourself the following questions:
- Did I get all of the questions right?
- If you missed any, which ones did you miss and why was your answer wrong?
- Which questions did I struggle to answer without looking at the source material?
It’s important to remember that when you get to the comprehension questions portions of the speed reading test, you won’t be allowed to reference the source text. Practicing reading passages quickly alongside annotations/practice questions will help you adequately prepare to do well on the test!
If you’d like to keep track of your scores, the math is fairly easy. Simply record the time you spent reading a passage, and divide that value (in minutes) by the amount of words in the passage. For example:
If you read 450 words in 1.3 minutes (approximately 78 seconds), you would calculate 450 ÷ 1.3, which equals out to 346 WPM rounded. A good goal to set would be to consistently hit above 300 WPM while maintaining a high comprehension rate (70% correct answers or more).
