Any CARS Strategies to boost score in 2 weeks time?

[strugstofunc]

Hello!

I was just wondering if any one has an CARS strategies that have helped them boost their CARS score significantly. I have been using some TPR strategies, and they have not been cutting it. I tend to spend way too long "working and reading" the passage, and that leaves me little time to work the questions. Has anyone experienced any of these problems before? If so, how did you improve?

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[JimKimSlim]

Do you know which type of CARS problem you're struggling the most? Is it foundation, reasoning within, or reasoning outside the text? If you're struggling in one of those, then you should use the rest of the time to hammer on those by reviewing from AAMC materials and even creating your own AAMC-style problems. The latter helped me a bit in my case.

 

[strugstofunc]

Thank you! Yes I’ve noticed it’s reasoning within primarily. @JimKimSlim when it comes to approaching the passages, what reading strategies did you use, if you had to?

I make stupid mistakes when I skim and make stupid mistakes when I take too long reading the passages (because I have to do Qs in so little time). So I’m just trying to find a balance.

 

[JimKimSlim]

To me, I never proceed to the questions until I feel confident about my comprehension of the passage. I usually highlight the main idea from each paragraph. At the end of the passage, I create a mental flowchart of all the main ideas and the thesis without looking back at the passage. All of this took me at most 6 minutes, and I use the following 3-4 minutes for the problems. When I do this, I rarely go back to the passage and solve foundation problems in like 15 seconds. When they specifically refer you to a sentence, I use about 30-45 seconds to go back and pick the answer through process of elimination.
IMO, CARS is all about understanding and retaining what you read. As long as I could remember the mental flowchart, I did fine on all types of passages. This helped me get a 128 on the actual test.