Desperate help on Reading Comprehension

[Vicky1106]

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What do you do on this section exactly?
I have try several methods suggest from Kaplan, Barron's book and my own method on the reading comprehension part, and they all do not work, my score is still very low. So does anyone have any suggestions as to what to do? a method that help you get that high score ? strategies? tips?
If I go about reading it, like actually read the passage instead of skim, I got almost all the questions right but then ran out of time, if I rush through it or skimming it, then miss too many questions.
Now, I don't know what to do about it, and the test is approaching 🙁

 

[mug3n]

Get some MCAT verbal reasoning book (Examkrackers is a good choice) and time yourself for how long it takes you to do 8-9 passages which will be the equivalent of what you'll be facing on the PCAT. Then make adjustments from there depending on your score/time elapsed. What I'd do is read the passage, make 1-2 point form notes besides each paragraph that encompasses the main ideas mentioned (or at the very least, underline) and you will find that when you get to the questions it makes finding the answers much, much easier.

In general, the types of questions you'll be seeing in reading comp is invariably the following almost 95% of the time:
1. understanding of the general content. So questions like "main idea", "central thesis", "most suitable title for this writing"
2. analysis of the content. "the passage implies...", "author's purpose in using paragraph X"
3. evaluation. "which statement least supports idea X", "tone of the passage"

So mentally make note of important points that'll help you answer those as you're reading is also useful. For example, generally after the first paragraph the main idea that a passage will convey is usually very apparent because the thesis is usually within there somehow.

Even with that said, what you're asking is very superficial, you're not going to get some magic response that will help put you over the top in this section especially with the August PCAT only a week or so away (you should've realized much much earlier that you had a problem with the reading section, you would've been able to rectify it much more efficiently, now you have no one to blame but yourself). The only way to get better is practice, so just get as many of these types of questions under your belt as you can, but don't neglect your other sections... imo unless you're confident you're getting 99% on everything else you should really not be focusing all your efforts here. Best of luck.

 

[diastole]

This is a very hard section to improve and I doubt you can do much at this point. It sounds like you are reading too slowly. You can improve that by lots and lots of practice but you don't have time for that now. Maybe I'm wrong though and someone can give you good advice. For now though, I'd go with the method that gets you the most right answers. Don't forget that you should get about 25% of the questions right if you guess. So if you are running out of time on the last passage, the reading method sounds best. If you run out of time halfway through, the skim method is the better choice probably unless you are missing so many that it isn't worth it.

If you do end up retaking and even if you don't, I would add daily reading to your routine if you aren't doing that already. Read a newspaper or a science magazine or something. The speed will come with time.