Reading speed is one of the quietest ways the general academic module rewards or punishes you. Two candidates can understand a passage equally well, yet one finishes with time to check their answers while the other is still on the second question when the clock runs low. The difference is rarely raw intelligence — it is reading habits, most of them formed years ago and never examined. The good news is that reading speed is trainable, and unlike many exam skills it improves without any special knowledge of the dMAT itself. This article is about reading faster without trading away the accuracy that actually earns marks, because speed you cannot trust is worse than no speed at all.
Find what is actually slowing you down
Most slow reading is not caused by reading slowly — it is caused by reading the same words twice. Three habits quietly steal time, and naming them is the first step to fixing them.
The first is regression: your eyes jump back to re-read a phrase you already understood, usually out of a vague anxiety that you missed something. Most of the time you did not, and the reread costs you seconds you never get back. The second is subvocalisation taken to an extreme — sounding out every word in your head as if reading aloud. Some inner voice is normal and even helpful, but pronouncing each word fully caps your speed at roughly talking pace. The third is word-by-word fixation: stopping your eyes on every single word rather than taking in small groups at a glance.
You cannot fix what you have not noticed, so spend one practice session simply watching yourself read. Where do your eyes jump back? Where do you slow to a crawl? For many candidates the answer is dense sentences full of unfamiliar terms — and there, slowing down is correct. The goal is not uniform speed but spending your time where it earns something, exactly the mindset behind reading comprehension strategy: map the passage, then let each question tell you where to look closely.
Read in phrases, not words
The single most effective change is to widen what you take in with each glance. Fluent readers do not read one word at a time; their eyes land two or three words apart and absorb meaningful chunks — "the results of the study" as one unit rather than five separate stops. You already do this with familiar phrases; the skill is extending it to unfamiliar material.
Practise deliberately. Take any paragraph and try to make only two or three eye-stops per line instead of one per word, trusting your peripheral vision to catch the edges. It will feel uncomfortable and slightly reckless at first, which is the point — you are pushing past a habit. To quiet the inner voice, try reading a passage while gently humming or counting under your breath; it is hard to subvocalise and hum at once, and the exercise shows you that you can still understand text without pronouncing every word. Do this for a few minutes a day, not for hours; short focused reps build the habit faster than long grinding sessions, the same principle that governs building study stamina.
One caution worth repeating: reading in phrases is for the connective tissue of a passage — the setup, the examples, the transitions. When you hit the sentence that carries the argument or the number a question will hinge on, slow right down. Fast reading earns its keep by buying you time to be slow exactly where it matters.
Preview before you dive in
A little structure before you start reading makes the whole passage go faster. Spend a few seconds looking at the shape of the text: how long is it, how many paragraphs, is there an obvious introduction and conclusion? Reading the first sentence of each paragraph gives you a rough map of the argument before you commit to the detail. When you then read properly, you are filling in a framework you already half-know rather than discovering everything cold, and a framed passage is far quicker to absorb.
Previewing also protects your pacing. If you can see at a glance that a passage is long and dense, you know to budget more time for it and less for a short factual one — a judgement that keeps you from being ambushed by the clock, which is the heart of time management under pressure. Reading fast is only useful if it is aimed; previewing is what aims it.
Build the speed the boring way
There is no shortcut app or trick that reliably raises reading speed — the methods above work only if you practise them under realistic conditions. Read the kind of material the exam uses: articles and short factual passages of the sort you will meet in the general academic module, not just novels or social feeds, which train a very different, skimming kind of reading. Time yourself occasionally so you can see progress, but do not chase the stopwatch at the expense of understanding; a fast wrong answer scores nothing.
Above all, keep accuracy as the fixed point and let speed rise underneath it. Push your pace only as fast as you can go while still answering correctly, then let comfort at that pace pull the speed up naturally. When you are ready to test both together under real timing, work through original questions in the free dMAT diagnostic, where you will quickly feel whether your new reading habits hold up when the clock is running.
Keep speed in its place
Reading faster on the dMAT is not about forcing your eyes to sprint. It is about removing waste — the rereads, the word-by-word crawl, the cold start into an unmapped passage — so your natural reading can flow. Do that, read where it matters slowly and everywhere else lightly, and you will find the time you were missing was never lost to slow thinking. It was lost to habits you can change.
