Standardized measures are usually adopted as an index to the students’ reading comprehension. To mention as a problem here is that a large number of TOEFL or IELTS Kurdish test-takers complain about their struggles while taking a proficiency reading comprehension subtest. Students’ performance, especially beyond the normal expectations, has imperative instructional implications. The goal of the present quantitative study is to assess not only the learners’ reading comprehension ability, but some of the processes that give rise to comprehension (called reading comprehension strategies). This study attempts to examine 3rd grade college-students’ performance on a time-limited, group-administered test of reading comprehension, on the one hand, and to investigate their performance on their adopted metacognitive reading strategies by using a questionnaire, on the other hand. The reading comprehension Subtest was taken from the standardized IELTS exam which was administered to 72 subjects who were students in both of the English Departments from the Colleges of Education and of Basic Education at Salahaddin University-Erbil in academic year (2016-2017) in Iraqi Kurdistan Region. The study endeavors to respond to a number of questions pertaining to the students’ achievement level, their employed metacognitive reading strategies, and the effect of their adopted strategies on learners’ reading comprehension performance.