Guessing?? Skipping killer passage in VR?

[MBigD011]

I keep getting to my last passage in verbal with about 5 minutes left. Sometimes this gives me enough time to read the first sentence in each paragraph and attempt the questions, maybe getting 1-2 correct.

My question is I read something about the princeton review method is that you ID the "killer" passage and skip it. If I did that and slowed down on the other passages I may get more correct in the passages I read.

I have about one month to go b4 my test. Do you guys think I should slow down or keep practicing VR to try to get faster.

other day I had 4 min left, with one full passage to go, It was a convoluted passage about philosophy so I just guessed C for all. None of the answers were C - LOL but if I had guess A I wouldve gotten 3/5 correct ARGGH!

any insight on this would be great and some further explanation of the killer passage strategy ( I took kaplan)

thanks

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[rockaction]

I did not like the TPR method of the "letter of the day" for that killer passage. I wouldn't even be able to tell which one was "killer" until the questions. I was disappointed in their method and ended up just practicing on my own.

I'd say learn how to speed up your reading. Get the EK101 book for tons of practice passages. They're hard, but if you can get faster with those you'll be way better off on the AAMCs and the real thing.

But as far as tackling that killer passage...well, there's not much to say. If there's a really hard passage, you just need to realize it and make sure you don't spend too much time on it. But my philosophy was to get to every passage and work it as best I could. For some reason time wasn't an issue with me, but accuracy was.

 

[muhali3]

You have to learn how to answer questions quickly and if you're unsure, make a quick guess. Don't spend a bunch of time on figuring out the answer because you'll most likely end up with the wrong answer anyways and the loss of time will make you lose more points on other questions.

 

[Chowdder]

Taken from number 8 of Vihsadas' verbal guide. And I'll add a couple of my pointers to this. Answering without reading the passage is doable. Albet your score will not be as high as what it could be if you read the passage. But answering based solely on the question stem could be a very doable and valuable process for when you're out of time or even just during your normal practices. You need to think critically and analyze the answer choice. Usually, you can eliminate 2 out of the 4 choices using reasons listed by Vihsadas. You can either guess or think a little more about a question and be able to answer it with a high degree of certainty.

For example, I had a passage dealing with the evolution mutualistic relationship of flowers and insect pollenation and one of the question says something in the line of "If a botanist were to analyze newly unfossilized flower's mean of pollenation, according to the process outlined in the passage, he would be most interested in..."For this I didn't bother looking too deeply into the answer choices since I know from the question that it was a botanist and he would be more interested in the morphology of the flower, versus the insect ability to pollenate the flower. Of course it's a guess and that's what VR is all about, but if you think critically while reading the question and you should be able to increase your chances of success.

Best of luck

8) Learn to use process of elimination (POE). There are a few tricks you can use to POE the hell out of some verbal questions.
- Extreme sounding answers are almost always wrong. Exception: If the passage itself sounds extreme. You should still make sure that your answer choice fits with the logic of the question and the passage itself. For instance, the question could ask, "Which of the following is NOT representative of the author's stance of issue X". In these types of questions, the extreme answer might be right.

- In questions that ask you to describe the 'mood' of the author, or any question with 'one word' answer choices, answers that are similar or say the same thing are almost always both wrong. Check and see if you picked an answer that sounds very similar to another one, and make sure you know exactly why you chose that answer. The MCAT will never be cut and dry, so just make sure your logic about an answer choice is clear.
- Watch out answer choices with identical or similar vocabulary to the passage. A very common trick is that often words that were used in the passage will be transplanted into an answer choice with either: 1) a cause and effect relationship reversed so that it is wrong, 2) a fact from the passage taken out of context, 3) a hypothesis that is mis-stated, 4) a slight twisting of the author's logic, 5) an incorrect detail has been inserted into the answer choice. Watch out for these, and when you see an answer choice with alot of identical words to the passage, be very sure to dissect it so that you understand its meaning. As you practice more and more, you'll begin to find other curious aspects of answer choices and question stems that stick out at you."