UCAT ANZ verbal reasoning: beating the clock

Many students find Verbal Reasoning the subtest where time runs out first. The time pressure is built into the design. The skill is not reading faster for its own sake, but deciding what to read, what to skip and when to move on.

The numbers

According to the Consortium's test format page, the Verbal Reasoning subtest presents eleven passages of text, each with four questions. There are 44 questions in 22 minutes, with a 1 minute 30 second instruction section before it starts. It tests whether you can read passages closely, think through the information and decide if particular conclusions follow. Outside knowledge is not expected.

Some arithmetic helps plan the time:

As a rough guide only, reading a passage uses a large share of its two minutes, which leaves little for each question. If a passage is dense, you might spend more time on it and less on the questions that are quick to settle.

Each question is worth one mark, and there is no negative marking, so a guess is always better than a blank.

What the passages ask

The subtest is about deciding whether the information supports a conclusion. That means two different skills: reading accurately and judging how strongly the text supports an idea. The detail that trips people up is the gap between what the passage says and what you know or believe. Because outside knowledge is not expected, a statement that sounds true but is not supported by the passage is the wrong answer.

The Consortium's Verbal Reasoning question tutorial walks through the question types and strategies, and it is the best place to start. It is best viewed on a desktop.

What high scorers did

The Consortium's candidate advice page profiles students with high scores. A few ideas from them that apply here:

• Try several methods. One candidate found Verbal Reasoning the hardest subtest because reading large passages was difficult for them. They read the responses first, then skimmed the passage to select the best response. They add that this may not work for everyone and recommend trying several techniques and settling on the one that works best.
• Learn from mistakes. The same candidate found they were not improving at first and began to improve when they experimented with the way they approached questions, focusing on why they got a question wrong and whether they spent too long on it.
• Flag and move on. Another candidate says that if you can't see an answer quickly, flag it and move on, because there is no time to agonise and sometimes an educated guess is needed.
• Use the gap between subtests. The instruction section is a chance to breathe and reset, and to focus only on the subtest in front of you.

A practice method that builds speed

Speed comes after accuracy, so build in stages:

1. Untimed, one passage at a time. After each answer, write the sentence in the passage that justifies it. If you cannot find one, you are using outside knowledge.
2. Targeted skimming. Practise finding where a fact is in the passage without rereading everything. Underline keywords in your head: names, numbers, "however", "only", "all".
3. Timed passages. Set a two minute timer for each passage and its four questions. Stop when it rings, even if you have not finished, then look at what you did with the time.
4. A full subtest. Do 11 passages in 22 minutes.
5. Review by type. Sort mistakes into misread, over-read (brought in outside knowledge), ran out of time and guessed wrong.

If a passage will clearly take too long, the sensible choice is to answer the quick questions about it, guess the rest and move on. All questions are worth the same, so a dense passage is not worth more marks than an easy one.

The last minute

Because there is no negative marking, make sure every question has an answer before the subtest ends. If you are running short, answer the remaining questions quickly with your best guess, flag any you want to return to, and use whatever time remains for the flagged ones. A complete answer sheet with some guesses is always better than a careful answer sheet with six blanks.

Reading skills outside the test

Verbal Reasoning rewards a habit more than a trick: reading dense, factual text carefully. Newspaper features, science journalism, government reports and journal abstracts all work. After each one, try to state in one sentence what it claims and one thing it does not claim. This builds the muscle that the test uses, and it helps your school English and science too.

How scores look

The Consortium publishes summary statistics each year. For 2026, among 17,341 candidates, the Verbal Reasoning scaled score had a mean of 619 and a median of 610. The first quartile was 560 and the third quartile 670, on a scale from 300 to 900. These show the spread, not a target, and different universities use scores differently.

Where to go next

• Decision Making: how it works
• Using the free materials in order
• Timed UCAT ANZ Verbal Reasoning sets are available as part of our plans, with samples on the samples page.

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Not affiliated with, or endorsed by, the UCAT ANZ Consortium.