CARS - ranking passages?

[Fearquell]

Hi,

The TPR CARS workbook advises to rank the passages in order of difficulty and do the easy ones first. Do people find this strategy to work in terms of scoring and/or time spent?

Best,
FQ

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[pms_testosterone]

No, don't waste your time doing this.

 

[noob101]

Hi,

The TPR CARS workbook advises to rank the passages in order of difficulty and do the easy ones first. Do people find this strategy to work in terms of scoring and/or time spent?

Best,
FQ

I'm currently in the midst of content review/practice (planning on taking the test in January) and have also just run across this strategy in the CARS book. From what I can tell, this strategy is a time waster. Some difficult passages will have easy questions and some easy passages will have difficult questions. If you waste time jumping around, you might end up not having time for those easy questions that you'd get correct.

 

[Zenabi90]

This was a legitimate strategy for the old MCAT, where you had less time per passage. Many students would complain about now being able to finish, so to maximize points, you would do the "easy" and "medium" ones to the best of your ability, and any "hard" or "excruciating" ones you'd simply do what you could, and generally guess on if you were running out of time.

Now, the general consensus among takers is that there is plenty of time (10min per passage set) which is doable with enough practice, so the old advice to rank your passages is outdated.