EIAT reading comprehension guide: the cloze format explained

Reading comprehension is the largest EIAT section at 35 of the 100 questions, and it is the one people most often prepare for incorrectly.

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It is not the format you are expecting

Most aptitude-test practice teaches the True / False / Cannot Say format: a passage, then a statement you judge against it. The EIAT does not use that.

NEIEP's published example is a cloze passage. You get a short piece of prose with numbered gaps in it, and for each gap, four candidate words. You choose the word that belongs. That is the entire format.

If you spend your preparation on True/False/Cannot Say drills, you will arrive having practised a different skill.

What it is actually testing

Two things at once. Vocabulary, in the sense of knowing what ordinary words mean, and comprehension, in the sense of following the argument of the passage well enough to know which meaning is needed.

In NEIEP's own example the passage is about career readiness, and one gap sits in "Employers seek individuals who demonstrate strong ____". The options include adaptability and stubbornness. Both are real words and both are grammatical. Only one fits what the passage is saying.

How to answer quickly

1. Read the whole passage first. It is short. The gaps often depend on a sentence you have not reached yet, and a minute spent reading saves you guessing four times.
2. Predict before you look. Decide what sort of word the gap needs before reading the options. Going in with an expectation makes the right one jump out and stops a plausible wrong one anchoring you.
3. Check the whole sentence, not the gap. Several options will fit the words immediately around the gap. Usually only one fits the sentence as a whole.
4. Watch for opposites. Distractors are frequently the reverse of the right answer — stagnation against mindset, stubbornness against adaptability. If two options are opposites, one of them is very likely correct.
5. Trust the first fit. If you are constructing an elaborate reason why an unlikely word could work, you have gone past the intended answer.

Can you prepare for vocabulary?

Not by memorising word lists — the words used are ordinary. What does help is reading anything with an argument in it, regularly, for a few weeks before the test. That builds the thing actually being measured: following a piece of prose closely enough to know what belongs in it.

In the meantime, practise the format itself on our reading comprehension section, which uses the same cloze structure as the paper.