UCLAstudent said:
I got 9-11 on the practice exams, and 10 on the real deal. Even if the questions aren't representative, they still helped me to gauge my score. If you are having trouble with verbal, I recommend the EK 101 passages book. I did this book instead of Berkeley Review's verbal book and saw my score increase by four points throughout the book.
You have no idea how much your affirmation of score relevance helped me. Thank you and thank tic112 for putting that information out there. I now feel I can trust my BR scores and that I am ready to get this test behind me. You have help my confidence enormously, so thank you both.
If I can add a comment on verbal, I used a combination of EK and PR in April and got an 8. I too saw my EK scores increase by 4 (from 6 to 10). I felt confident because of that, but on the real MCAT I choked. I think what may have happened is that I focused too much on EK and the MCAT wasn't like what I expected. The EK verbal materials are very good, but I needed to do more of a variety of passages.
This time I'm using passages from a wide array of sources, including AAMC, PR, EK, and the BR book. And while I agree that BR's verbal is not as great as their science materials, I find that the passages are about the same as PR and EK. I'm more of a science person than a verbal person, so maybe they all look the same because I can't tell the differences. But as a science person, the best verbal preparation I have found after doing PR classes, EK books, and BR classes are the classroom exercises we did with BR this summer. I'm not good at verbal, so many of the techniques we tried were godsends. Some weren't useful, but it was good to try them and discover for myself that
mapping and fishing wouldn't work for me. I feel that BR has helped me to solidify an approach that works for me. Maybe its me wanting to believe in the system so I can go into the MCAT more confident this time, but I honestly feel that even though I'm not innately a verbal person, I can do well on this test by applying the test skills that I naturally use in the sciences to verbal. My scores have improved on the passages I do from all the different souces, so I'm feeling pretty good right now.
