How did you improve your verbal score?

[Susanoo]

I cannot seem to break my verbal score barrier currently. I originally scored a 7 on my diagnostic and a 7 on my first full length in verbal. After I made some minor adjustments, I started scoring 10's repeatedly, with a few 9's sprinkled here and there. I ended up scoring a 9 in verbal on the real thing (NOOOO!). I pretty much stopped practicing verbal after the first few full lengths because I couldn't seem to improve it any further.

I do not believe I ever hit an 11 in verbal. Basically, the only verbal I did for the 2 months leading up to my exam were from the full lengths I was taking. I did no extra practice outside of that. I have no idea what I can do or how I can improve my score. I would really like to be hitting a higher verbal score, but I do not know how...

Thoughts?

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[Doctor W]

You should buy 2 books:
EK101
Kaplan Verbal

These will provide 20 Verbals Tests. This should boost your score by a couple points.

 

[Susanoo]

I have both of these books and I have done about half of the passages in both. The reason I am making this thread is because any amount of practice did not improve my score past my 9-10 range, so I just stopped practicing. After my initial improvement from 7 to 10, my score didn't budge.

 

[efle]

Getting you to a 9-10 is what the books aim to do - there is no "here's how to tackle passages" formula that will get you up to, say, a 12-13. At that point it comes down to being able to very quickly absorb everything the authors say and imply in passages, and gain an intuition for two answers being right, but one more right than the other, as tends to happen in the trickiest problems. So to keep improving past 9-10, you need to be getting very meta, and ask what about a question you got wrong led you astray (did you select the second best correct answer? was the author being ironic and you missed it?) and watch for similar situations in the future.

 

[texan2414]

I agree 100% with efle.

Difference between 10-11 vs 11-12, etc is remarkably small. I think most improvement after VR definitely comes from the sciences because they are more approachable than VR for most premeds.

 

[NextStepTutor_1]

I agree with the two posts ahead of me, but if you're scoring a 9 and want more an 11 and higher then you'll need to do much more. But it's possible! I've seen it happen, but the work that you must put in can be immense. You need to fully assess your strategy and change or tweak it if need be (sometimes harder than it sounds), you need to review INTENSELY with the ultimate goal of getting inside the head of the test-maker, and you should do outside reading.

There's some additional advice that goes into more detail on our page:
http://forums.studentdoctor.net/forums/next-step-mcat-tutor-office-hours.970/

Good luck!