I would definitely go with EK. The passages on the real MCAT are usually about a paragraph longer than any practice passage I had, and going back to the passage a lot, and skipping around, and writing stuff down as you read takes up an enormous amount of time. EK's strategy is to go straight through the passages in the order they come, but I wouldn't say they are saying you guess and hope for the best. They say you should read the passage while thinking about the main idea. Why did the author write the passage in the first place? What were they trying to convey? And Answer the questions with how you think the author would answer. It might be helpful, at the end of reading a passage to stop and think for a second about these questions, maybe start off writing the answers down and referring back to what you wrote while you answer the questions. Once you get better at it, you will probably be able to do it without taking up that time to write things down. The one thing from kaplan that I thought was useful for the verbal section was categorizing the passage, because that gives me a hint as to how "strong" the answers should be. For example, if the passage is clearly argumentative/persuasive the answer choice that you would be looking for would have some strong wording in it (if that makes sense). Really though practice is what will really help you improve your score, regardless of what technique you use. Definitely get the 101 passages in EK verbal and just chug through it (always timed...and I also made sure that I ALWAYS had 5-7 min left at the end of my timed tests because I had heard that the passages were longer on the real thing, and I am SO glad that I did that, because many people ran out of time on the real thing, and I just made it). Good luck
