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Discover Your Odds of Getting into Medical School
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This is the hardest thing to improve and probably takes a few years. For CARS I would recommend reading newspapers or books. The opinion section in the NYT is good.
For science, the highest bang for your buck would be molecular genetics and biochem articles. These types of papers are all written very similarly... the Nature articles are probably more interesting though.
 
I'd found reading philosophy pieces, then analyzing them/reading analysis on them super helpful for CARS. It helps you get used to figuring out the authors perspective and/or argument from complex writing, which is pretty much what the CARS section tests.
 
Read books for fun (1 book a week), learn vocab, 2 practice passages a day, and 1 NYT op-ed article per day. Start 1-2 years prior and you'll see a drastic improvement. stay motivated!
 
"How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading" is great for developing an analytical approach to your reading. I've found it very helpful in my own reading and I wish I had read it before I took the MCAT.
 
Other suggestions for reading...cell.com, Atlantic, NEJM, The New Yorker, The Wilson Quarterly.

It is important that you just read read read. The earlier you get started the better.

For those of you still early in your pre-med...pay attention to this thread. Get reading now. Books, articles, and as was suggested...Philosophy is great for the CARS section! 3-4 years of extensive reading could easily add 3-4 points to your CARS section.
 
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I have no idea if this helps on the MCAT, but annotate your books! I've always been an avid reader but started annotating books that I read outside of class a year or two ago and I feel like I get more out of it and enjoy them more. The only problem is I don't really like to get books from the library anymore, so I have to spend a little more on cheap used copies.
 
Woah let's hold on a minute...the CARS section will NOT take 2 years to improve on. I'm saying this from personal experience as well as from going through the process with others and seeing them improve. It seems as though everyone is worried with the aspect of "critically reading" and not the aspect of just beating the CARS section.

The truth is every CARS section you ever take will ALWAYS trick you in the same ways. You will ALWAYS make the same mistakes over and over simply because your way of interpreting writing is different from the way the test sees as correct. We all have our own mental heuristics; our "short cuts," if you will. The key is for you to find the unconscious short cuts or stereotypes that are causing you to repeatedly miss questions. This is the SAME self-awareness that we say is necessary to limit prejudice.

Please let me show an example, my favorite to show any friends looking for help. Consider you are reading a passage in which an author is describing his opinion of a piece of art, and the overall tone makes it obvious that the author HATES that piece of art. In the middle of the passage you come across this sentence: "Apart from its balanced color scheme, the painting is terrible because...[many reasons]." The author then continues to bash the painting.

There will absolutely be a question that asks something along the lines of "what is the author's opinion of the painting?" And one of the answer choices will be something very positive RELATING to a balanced color scheme but not those exact three words. The other answers will all look appealing because they will all be negative and will look similar enough to you as something written in the passage.

I can say I personally missed questions like this the first time because I wasn't trained to be aware of CONCESSIONS made in arguments. After I realized the importance of taking mental notes when seeing a phrase like "apart from" I could very easily save a question on the CARS section. The process only begins there. This section of the exam is all about finding the patterns in your mistakes and absolutely obliterating your mental short cuts that cause you to make those mistakes.
 
Toutie said:
Other suggestions for reading...cell.com, Atlantic, NEJM, The New Yorker, The Wilson Quarterly.

It is important that you just read read read. The earlier you get started the better.

For those of you still early in your pre-med...pay attention to this thread. Get reading now. Books, articles, and as was suggested...Philosophy is great for the CARS section! 3-4 years of extensive reading could easily add 3-4 points to your CARS section.
Click to expand...

What would you say is a good source for philosophy articles?
 
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