Help with Verbal

[homebody]

I am taking the JUNE 13 MCAT exam and and in dire need to improve my verbal score. I average 8-10 and the highest I got was 11 but only once. I don't know how to approach study in the last stretch. I get at least 10's on my BS and PS but I really need verbal to pull through for me. HELP! Any short but sweet strategies that worked for you on taking this section, for me I felt that it was more intuition then mapping.

Thanks.

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[RySerr21]

I am taking the JUNE 13 MCAT exam and and in dire need to improve my verbal score. I average 8-10 and the highest I got was 11 but only once. What should I do, I am in a state of worry and I don't know how to approach study in the last stretch. I get at least 10's on my BS and PS but I really need verbal to pull through for me. HELP! Any short but sweet strategies that worked for you on taking this section, for me I felt that it was more intuition then mapping.

Thanks.

are you having trouble with timing? are you spacing out during boring passasges? not understanding questions? this is the advice i gave someone else. it improved my score on practice exams, i dunno how it worked out on the real thing.

The way I did it was i figured out the checkpoints for 8.5 minutes and i wrote them down so i'd have something to check myself with. So on a sheet of scratch paper I had 60, 51.5, 43, 34.5, 26, 17.5, 9.

So, starting on my first passage i knew that i should have been done by the time the timer on the screen said 51:30....second passage i knew i had to finish by 43..... I also knew that if i was a few seconds over it wouldnt matter b/c I had 9 minutes for the last passage. It worked out very well and is an easy way to keep track of time.

another thing i recommend which worked well for me is DO NOT do the passages in the order if you dont want to. I got good enough that I could tell whether or not I would like a passage within the first 3 words. If i didn't like it b/c i thought it would be boring or if i didnt like it b/c it seemed hard....i skipped it. Do the passages that keep your interest FIRST, they are all worth the same amount of points. It would be dumb to spend 12 min on the first passage b/c it was ridiculously, long, hard, and boring and you had trouble with the questions. Chances are you are going to get those questions wrong anyway...save them til the end and make sure you have time for the questions you know you can get right. they make it very easy to go back and forth between passages. at any time you can click the "review" button and it shows you every "marked" or skipped question.

 

[homebody]

Thanks for the reply, I will try your advice. It seems to me that I usually lose focus when I read the passages. I get lost in train of thought... stamina is sometimes an issue and I find myself scrambling during the last passage as a result. Most of the questions I miss are usually detailed questions. I think its also in part because I take section after section and become fatigue, then as my verbal scores decline somewhat, I find myself more worried. A viscious cycle which I will break for MCAT!