Improving at MCAT verbal natural science passages?

[LawNonTrad]

Hi guys,

I am taking the MCAT in July 2011 (only have one of the prereqs completed so far, although almost done with the second, coming from a nontraditional law background) and so I've decided to start working on the only part of the MCAT that I'm qualified to do at this point, verbal. I started the verbal preparation today by taking my first practice test, that Practice-3 test online that AMCAS offers. I finished the 40 question section in about 45 minutes and missed 2 of them, both in the natural science passage. I really need to improve my skills in the natural sciences passages, perhaps even focusing exclusively on those. The other passages weren't really a problem at all (having had to read much more boring crap in law school) but the geology-related passage really threw me for a loop, missing half of the questions on it.

I really need to get a perfect score or at least a 14 on the verbal to make up for the worse scores that I'll be getting on the sciences sections of the MCAT (yeah) because my GPA is only going to be about a 3.38 when this is all and said and done... so I'm going to need like a 37 MCAT in order to get in somewhere (add to that the fact that I won't be going complete until end of August). And every extra point that I can get on the verbal is one point less that I need to get in one of the other two sections, as long as they are still 10+.

The problem is that I feel like I might have peaked. It's always those two or three questions in a section that you miss on a standardized test that are the toughest to pick up points from with later review, at least from my experience. Is it possible to get a 15 on verbal if I'm starting from a solid 12-13 base? Has anyone on here ever gotten a 15? Looking at the MCAT stats from 2009:

http://www.aamc.org/students/mcat/admissionsadvisors/examstatistics/scaledscores/combined09.pdf

It looks like only 0.1% of test-takers received a 15V and only another 0.2% received a 14V. Should I just give up or is it worth devoting a couple hundred hours over the course of this next year to try to pick up those 2-3 points?

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[LUCPM]

The good news is you are very strong with VR. That is an excellent score! If you are getting into that score range, your score narrowly depends on your luck, one careless mistake, or even what you ate, etc. Since PS and BS section are much, much easier to improve, it may be reasonable to divert your well-honed reasoning skills towards the science section. Good luck.

BTW, could you offer any tips for VR?

 

[LawNonTrad]

The good news is you are very strong with VR. That is an excellent score! If you are getting into that score range, your score narrowly depends on your luck, one careless mistake, or even what you ate, etc. Since PS and BS section are much, much easier to improve, it may be reasonable to divert your well-honed reasoning skills towards the science section. Good luck.

BTW, could you offer any tips for VR?

Thanks LUCPM.

As for tips, hmm. I can tell you what I did on the MCAT vr practice section today and what I did for reading comprehension sections on the LSAT and as practice a few years ago. I don't know how many words are in each MCAT passage, but I'd estimate it's about 400-600. I skimmed hrough each passage briefly, reading it aloud in my head. I took about one minute to one minute and a half to do this. I then went through the passage questions and answered the ones that refer back directly to the passage for context (ex: when the author says X, what is he/she most likely referring to, questions like that, or ex: the author would most likely agree with which of the following statements). Then I try to attack the thesis questions and the inference questions. I don't always categorize them correctly but I tried to spend no more than 45 seconds per question. I finished in 40 minutes so obviously I could have spent more time on the section and I plan to for future practice sections. On the more difficult questions that I couldn't quickly establish the answer to, I attempted to knock out two answers that didn't make any sense (extreme things that I knew weren't possible). That narrowed it down to two choices and I tried to put myself in the mind of the person who wrote the passage and what I thought the correct answer was based on that. Again, if I needed to, I referred back to specific parts of the passage if the question mentioned it. If it mentioned a term not mentioned until paragraph 3, I focused in on paragraph 3 and tried to establish context so that I could select the correct answer.

I hope this is along the lines of what you were looking for. If you need any clarification or want to discuss this further, please feel free to respond in thread or in PM. Maybe I can give you more verbal tips and you can give me some general chem tips because I'll be finishing gen chem II up in a couple of weeks so I can start practicing those questions too.