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No harm in practicing reading comprehension early, especially if you know you struggle with it. If not, I wouldn't invest too much energy into preparing for an MCAT 6 months away if you have other commitments to school or work. Personally, I didn't practice CARS independently of FLs at all, but I know plenty of students who struggle with CARS exclusively. Everyone is different! Best of luck!
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I regressed in CARS. I started out doing EK and TPR for practice and felt like I was improving. Those ran dry and I switched to AAMC materials and KA. I felt like I was still fairing well. Then when I started FLs, I got my butt handed to me. I have lost all confidence. I'm down to using the CARS sections from commercial FLs as my resource for practicing, because there aren't enough good materials. NS and TBR blow for CARS. You should pace your materials in CARS. Unlike the sciences, which thanks to 800 passages in TBR books and AAMC Q packs and SBs you have tons a great materials, there is not a lot of useful CARS stuff out there.
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The key to doing well on CARS is understanding the author’s main argument and using it to answer questions. It’s possible to score really high by following certain patterns in the questions and examining the nuances in the passage. This requires strong active reading skills in timed conditions.
A good CARS guide is: Testing Solutions' 30 Day Guide to MCAT CARS Success
If you want to get better at active reading, you could take a philosophy or literature course that forces you to critique the author’s work.
A good CARS guide is: Testing Solutions' 30 Day Guide to MCAT CARS Success
If you want to get better at active reading, you could take a philosophy or literature course that forces you to critique the author’s work.
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Just to chip in my thoughts, I think you can start prepping for the CARS well in advance. I think reading about strategy well in advance and then giving yourself a light schedule of practice over the long term can really help. I really disagree with the idea that "reading" randomly will just help your CARS, because the CARS requires you to synthesize your reading to answer questions in a set amount of time. Reading a NYT or Economist article doesn't allow you to test your comprehension or practice synthesizing that information and it also does not train you to move efficiently through the passage. I've worked with hundreds of students personally and I've never seen that strategy work for people.
Instead, my advice would be to find a guide you like, IMHO a pretty good was mentioned previously 🙂 and then I'd start pyramiding your passages gradually. Maybe for the first month, do one passage a day (timed of course! never, ever do a passage untimed) five days a week. The next month do two passages five days a week. Maybe the next month, jump up to 3. By then you'll have a strong base of CARS prep going into your dedicated MCAT study. If I was studying for the MCAT again, this is how I would study for CARS.
Best of luck on your MCAT and please let us know if there's anything else we can do to help you!
Instead, my advice would be to find a guide you like, IMHO a pretty good was mentioned previously 🙂 and then I'd start pyramiding your passages gradually. Maybe for the first month, do one passage a day (timed of course! never, ever do a passage untimed) five days a week. The next month do two passages five days a week. Maybe the next month, jump up to 3. By then you'll have a strong base of CARS prep going into your dedicated MCAT study. If I was studying for the MCAT again, this is how I would study for CARS.
Best of luck on your MCAT and please let us know if there's anything else we can do to help you!
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Are there enough good CARS passages available to do the pyramid? If you run your pyramid for twelve weeks at 5 days per week with 1 passage/day the first week up to 6 passages/day by week six, then you will need 75 passages for the first five weeks and 210 passages for the last seven weeks. Even with four sources, how do you get 300 good passages?
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So my thinking was the OP said 6 months out from test day. So 3 months of the pyramid and then 3 months of dedicated study with lots of full-length practice. 1 month of 1 passage 5 days a week is 20, 2nd month of 5 days a week is 40, and 3rd month of 5 days a week is 60, which is a total of 120. Then in the 3 months of dedicated study, you can use the AAMC's released 76 passages. Also, by then you'll also be taking a ton of full-lengths which include CARS. So I do think there are enough passages out there. The key is to just plan ahead. Picking up an old copy of the EK101 book and one of the TPR hyperlearning verbal books from before the switch in 2015 is a way to get some cheap practice, as well as nothing, really changed from the humanities and social science passages. (Just be sure to skip the natural science passages).
