How do you guys approach a passage that you know is well above your reading level? I even have trouble reading them when going over the exam and find myself reading it 3 or 4 times and still not getting the main idea. Sometimes all I see are words on a page. Any advice or pointers?
Good question. First off, based on my experience with EK practice plus AAMC 9 and 10, the test writers like to put 1-2 "killer" passages in each exam. Honestly, those are usually written terribly in this sort of unreadable academic hogwash style. So they are challenging us to comprehend difficult passages when, of course, the writers should be sent to kindergarten to learn how to write a clear essay. I just had the one on AAMC 10 about "concepts" and it was ridiculous. If one of my friends wrote something like that I'd have them committed.
Given that they do have 1-2 of these "killer" passages/exam, I guess the only advice I can offer is to keep practicing verbal with the top materials you can find, and really do good analysis of why you got an answer wrong.
Plus, the more practice you do, the more you can "intuit" what is a good versus bad MCAT answer.
This will not only help you on the insane "killer" passages, but on the easier ones too. In fact, I'd argue that your yield in points will come more from the easy-to-normal passages and less from the ones that were written by an ivory tower academician that hasn't talked to a normal person for three decades.
🙂
EDIT: I do think the main idea strategy combined with good application of other techniques is best approach. I haven't been doing any sort of Kaplan-style mapping but maybe it would help. Unfortunately I haven't gotten much yield out of EK's approach of "main idea". I guess part of the difficulty is that sometimes these essays are written in a style where the main idea is buried in a lot of nonsense. So I've been practicing reading very critically, constantly trying to "suss out" what the author is getting at. It can be tough, but keep practicing!
