Back to study for the MCAT again

[Rolling]

Last year I was studying all summer for this test

I was averaging 11.4 on PS, 8.8 on VR, 11.4 on BS for the AAMC tests. I am really angry with myself for not going through with it, but I was too worried about my verbal score. Do any of you have recommendations for me? I am going to try to get access to Kaplan materials again and see where I can go from there. Any help or advice is appreciated. I don't want to give up this time.

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[pick8]

Good luck man. I'm sure it's tough to get back into it after what happened. Hope things work out this time!

As for verbal, the only advice I can give you would be to a) not get bogged down in the details of the passages (you can always refer back to them later if a question requires it), and b) not use Kaplan. I used Kaplan to study, and I thought that verbal was by far the weakest part of the study books. More often than not I disagreed with the answers/explanations that Kaplan gave, and I found that Kaplan's passages really didn't do a good job of mimicking the actual test.

 

[LaZigeuner]

EK 101 seems to be the book-of-choice for practice verbal passages. TPRH verbal workbook seem to be the 2nd practice passages-of-choice.

Also, there are the AAMC verbal passages. If you've already taken them, you could dissect them for question type, pinpoint the exact type/s of question/s that is/are your weakness (inference, application, extrapolation, whatever), or see if you have another problem (reading comprehension, test-taking anxiety, etc.).

After you've pinpointed your weaknesses/problems as precisely as you can, you can tailor practice to it:

For example: working practice passages, do the first couple/few untimed, and when you come to a question of the type that you're weak in, slow down and write out your thought processes and check every mental connection you make for accuracy.

Or: if you're reading articles for practice (often suggested are New Yorker, Atlantic; also Financial Times, Harper's, well-written newspaper editorials perhaps, and a book SN2ed recommends in his 3-month thread), after reading one, as yourself questions that are of the form of your weakness. This will take some time at first, but it's like learning to read for the first time, when we sounded out letters and strung them together, then pronounced the whole word and adjusted pronunciation of the letters as needed.