How long did it take you to improve in verbal

[Nyphool]

I am currently doing the kaplan verbal material. People are saying the real mcats makes the kaplan material look like a joke. That is pretty intimidating considering i am not stellar at the kaplan stuff. What is it like 90% to get a 10? Thats crazy.

I was just wondering a few things. How long did it take you to improve in verbal? How many points did you improve in that time span. How many hours per day or hours per week did you dedicate. Before you first looked at an mcat exam, did you consider yourself strong in verbal? How often did you become frustrated with this section. What did you do to overcome that frustration? thanks

---

Members don't see this ad.

 

[ser1218]

I would have to say verbal was also my weakest section. I took the Kaplan online course and got an 8 on the initial diagnostic test. On this past August test, I wound up getting a 10 on verbal. I took all the practice verbal reasoning tests Kaplan offerred and did about 7 of the full length tests. I never managed to get above an 11 on verbal when practicing, so I was pretty happy with a 10 on test day. So I essentially improved 2 points in the span of about a month and a half. I personally didn't think the kaplan review materials for verbal were that bad, but examkrackers is good for verbal too.

It is almost impossible to know what your scaled score (1-15) will be based upon your raw score. It is different for every test and depends on how everyone else does. But generally, you don't need a 90% to get a 10. A 90% usually will be a 12 or 13 in my opinion. The key is just take as many practice verbal tests as you can, get used to how fast you have to read, and so forth. I hope this helps.

 

[swifteagle43]

I improved my verbal from a 9 to a 14 in 3 weeks of studying over the summer. But I got a 690 on verbal(92nd) percentile and am very comfortable with it

 

[Avenue Q]

The first time i took a diag (princeton review) i got a 6, although i REALLY had to go to the bathroom during that section, so it probably would have been a bit higher.

on my last 2 diags (which are aamc ones) i got a 13 and 14, and on the real test i got a 12.

i only really worked on the section we did in class, and i focused my studing on the sciences. i just needed to get used to the passages. occasionally i would practice, but it wasn't my priority at all. the improvement was over a summer course. i found that looking at the question types i was getting wrong really helped. i would always get one type wrong, and being able to pick them out while doing the test was helpful because i knew not to go with my first responce.

But like the other poster, i'm pretty good at the verbal thing (SATs i got a 780, although im not sure if that applies).

hope that helps.

 

[fpr85]

I am currently doing the kaplan verbal material. People are saying the real mcats makes the kaplan material look like a joke. That is pretty intimidating considering i am not stellar at the kaplan stuff. What is it like 90% to get a 10? Thats crazy.

I actually read on these forums that the KAPLAN tests are supposed to be harder than the actually test, that way you can't get your money back since you're almost certain to do better on the actual thing than the diagnostic tests..

 

[LiNk]

I was just wondering a few things. How long did it take you to improve in verbal? How many points did you improve in that time span. How many hours per day or hours per week did you dedicate. Before you first looked at an mcat exam, did you consider yourself strong in verbal? How often did you become frustrated with this section. What did you do to overcome that frustration? thanks

April MCAT 6V; August MCAT 9V
I got a 6 on the April MCAT OUCH!! That was embarrassing. Verbal is my weakness obviously. I took Kaplan last spring and scored 8-11 on Kaplan practice tests 1-8. Over the summer I used EK Verbal 101 (11 verbal tests) and did 9 of the kaplan verbal tests- those extra ones from the internet. Did you get a free subscription to the Wall Street Journal when you signed up for Kaplan? Read that. Over the summer I read a newspaper/New Yorker/Scientific American once every couple days. That was key... definitely read news articles. I read books as well (Stephen King's Gunslinger series) but that was for fun.
I was always frustrated with verbal and I never really felt confident. I even feel awkward here b/c a 9 is nothing to brag about but a 3 point improvement is huge and I'll take it. I overcame my frustration by practicing like hell. Over the summer I would take a practice test about every other day. By July I was consistently scoring 9s and 10s.

 

[MrTee]

Verbal is easily the most difficult section to raise. Practice may help, but it's pretty tough to do over the short term. The best solution is to read lots of boring stuff for a year or so prior to the mcat, and really learn to understand what they're saying. If you don't have that luxury, you should just do as many practice passages as possible.

 

[drjj]

When i took the april mcat i got a 7v, so what i did was just take practice verbal reasoning tests from a review kaplan book, and some exam krackers tests. I always got frustrated with verbal but i thought the key was my time management. I would do a passage and no matter where i was i would move on to another passage after 8 minutes. Therefore at the end i had plenty of time to go back over my answers. But this was my technique and it might not work for everybody.Just go in there and think positive. I ended up with a 10v in august so i was pumped up about it.

 

[MrTee]

When i took the april mcat i got a 7v, so what i did was just take practice verbal reasoning tests from a review kaplan book, and some exam krackers tests. I always got frustrated with verbal but i thought the key was my time management. I would do a passage and no matter where i was i would move on to another passage after 8 minutes. Therefore at the end i had plenty of time to go back over my answers. But this was my technique and it might not work for everybody.Just go in there and think positive. I ended up with a 10v in august so i was pumped up about it.

I used a tactic similar to this except I let myself have 10-11 min per passage, then I would move on no matter what. This left me with no time to go back to check (which I thought would have been too time consuming for my reading rate), but it worked out okay. Try out a bunch of different approaches and see what works best for yourself.