Just a thought...?

[marbou3]

For those with low verbal scores...which seems to be the section people have problems with, I have a thought. Assuming that time and money aren't a big issue, couldn't you take a semester or year off and read (A LOT!!). You could hold a job and read a ton in the mean time. This would have to drastically raise your verbal score right? I know this would be a huge sacrifice but if medicine is what you truely desire it seems like this may be a good idea.

Any thoughts...

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[BloodySurgeon]

sometimes its not clear cut like that. I had been scoring very low on the verbal and decided to take a lot of time off and read constantly with doing verbal passages. Eventually my verbal scores improved, I took the test and still didnt do well on the verbal. Now I am studying again for the mcat and have been improving only by 1 point prior to taking the exam and its been near a year of studying.

Sometimes its luck too and your mood at that day... I once got really lucky on a practice test and got 2 psych passages (psych major), a science passage, and topics that I knew extensive info about and got a 14 on VR, but another test a week later I got an 8.

If you have the time, it is great to be reading beforehand... but I wouldn't suggest pausing your life for it.

 

[parto123]

I don't think it would work. Reading comp is the least "learnable" section on every standardized exam. This is probably because there really isn't anything you can do to study for it, other than practice questions. I have read that reading comp can be "gamed" by increasing the amount you read, but this has to be done at a much younger age when a person's capacity for learning and improvement are exponentially higher. Once youre in college already, any improvement from increased reading would be marginal.

 

[Jolie South]

this is more of an MCAT related issue. moving to MCAT Discussions.

 

[Vihsadas]

If you were going to take a year off to learn verbal what would probably be more helpful would be to take liberal arts courses, history, english or poli sci that have reading and multiple choice based exams...Also, get your hands on every test prep company's verbal workbooks and verbal materials and do all of them. If you had a year and you were doing say a little bit every day you could feasibly get through about 1000 practice passages.
If you didn't figure it out by then, then I don't know what you'd do!

(Warning: This post is blatantly promoting 'overkill' studying. )