Keeping the time during the MCAT

[kwu]

Hi,


It is known that the MCAT have a very tight time per section, meaning you never want to spend longer time than needed on any particular passage. How do you make sure that you are still within an "acceptable" time during the test? Do you check the time on every question, passage, a couple of passages.. etc?

Personally, on the CARS section, I make sure not to exceeds 10 minutes per passage. If I found myself running out of time, I will just mark the question and move on. On the other sections, I find it harder to keep the time since there is a mix between passages and free standing questions.



How do you keep the time during the test?

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[DocSomeDay22]

That ten minute rule is a pretty good for CARS. On CARS, I skipped through the sections and marked random answers for the the one or two hardest passages. These passages are usually abstract and theoretical and I practiced spotting these quickly. If you have to re-read the first few sentences to understand it, skip it. 8 passages times 10 minutes per passage give you 80 minutes to answer eight passages of questions. This gives you 15 minutes to go back through the two tough passages that you marked. Look for the simple recall questions and answer these by scouring through the passages. Don't bother with the complicated questions (like the ones that try to get you to figure out how the author would respond to a piece of new evidence*) on the hard passages. These will screw you up and waste your time. This strategy got me to around 127-129 consistently on my practice tests.
*These questions are exceedingly time-consuming and tricky even on easy passages. Mark it and move on rather than screwing yourself out of time.

 

[kwu]

That ten minute rule is a pretty good for CARS. On CARS, I skipped through the sections and marked random answers for the the one or two hardest passages. These passages are usually abstract and theoretical and I practiced spotting these quickly. If you have to re-read the first few sentences to understand it, skip it. 8 passages times 10 minutes per passage give you 80 minutes to answer eight passages of questions. This gives you 15 minutes to go back through the two tough passages that you marked. Look for the simple recall questions and answer these by scouring through the passages. Don't bother with the complicated questions (like the ones that try to get you to figure out how the author would respond to a piece of new evidence*) on the hard passages. These will screw you up and waste your time. This strategy got me to around 127-129 consistently on my practice tests.
*These questions are exceedingly time-consuming and tricky even on easy passages. Mark it and move on rather than screwing yourself out of time.

127-129 is a pretty good score, great job! however, I've read from multiple sources that skipping the hard passages is not the best approach for two reasons. First, you will waste time trying to figure out the hard passage and decide that it's hard enough to be worth skipping. Second, some hard and abstract passages actually have really easy questions.

But since it's working for you and you're getting good scores on practice exams, I would keep doing it.

 

[mariposas905]

I'm also curious about this...for CARS, I do pretty much the same thing (9-10 minutes per passage, while marking the hard ones) Unfortunately, I still ran out of time on the real thing, because there was an easy passage with super hard questions that I spent more time on 🙁 so I had to guess on the last passage. Dreading my score now. For the sciences, I'm not sure how to time it exactly but I try to aim for 8-10 minutes per passage as well.

 

[DocSomeDay22]

127-129 is a pretty good score, great job! however, I've read from multiple sources that skipping the hard passages is not the best approach for two reasons. First, you will waste time trying to figure out the hard passage and decide that it's hard enough to be worth skipping. Second, some hard and abstract passages actually have really easy questions.

But since it's working for you and you're getting good scores on practice exams, I would keep doing it.

RIP me then. I'm already took the MCAT and am just waiting for my scores... so we'll see. I would take a practice test with this strategy and see how it works for you. I found that it was pretty easy to find the very hard passages. I could usually figure out that at least one of of the passages was way harder to understand than all of the others within 30 seconds. I switched to this strategy from just doing it straight through because I found my self spending up to 15 or 20 minutes on these hard passages only to get half of the questions associated with the passage wrong, while rushing though easy passages at the end that I could have spent more time on to get 100% correct. I'm a slow reader so I guess that's why this switch helped me out. I was in the 125-126 range before this change btw. Hope this is helpful. also, PRACTICE TESTS ARE KEY! And invest in the AAMC Sections banks and Q packs. Section banks will help you practice with very hard passages and questions mostly while Q packs are hard but more close to the actual test difficulty. Good luck!

 

[aldol16]

My strategy time-wise was to get the timing down before the exam so that I don't have to keep looking back at the clock - it's distracting. So I took all practice tests under timed conditions so that I would have the timing down and wouldn't have to worry about it on test day. In general, I didn't stick to any specific amount of time per passage (i.e. I didn't move on after 10 minutes if I couldn't answer the question). Rather, I looked to see if I was where I wanted to be on average. So when I was a third of the way through on time, was I a third of the way through the passages? If I wasn't, I knew I had to speed up. When I was halfway through on time, was I halfway through the passages?

The reason I like this strategy rather than sticking to some fixed number of minutes for each passage is because some passages will be much easier than others. You'll find yourself familiar with the topic at hand and be able to understand the passage more readily. This goes for both the science and CARS sections. Breezing through the easy passages leaves you time for the harder ones. Put another way, you shouldn't be spending the same amount of time on easy passages as hard ones - that's simply not an efficient use of time on the MCAT. If you allot yourself ten minutes per passage but then mark an answer and have to come back to answer it, that wastes time because you'll have to get re-oriented with the specific passage again and re-read some parts that you might have already pushed out of your mind. That's why I always answer every question per passage before moving on. If I'm unsure, I give it my best guess and mark it and come back to it if I still have time at the end.

I also, overall, didn't get bogged down on specific questions. If I could narrow it down to two or three answer choices (you should be able to for all questions), then I gave it my best guess, marked it for later review (time permitting), and moved on.

 

[DocSomeDay22]

My strategy time-wise was to get the timing down before the exam so that I don't have to keep looking back at the clock - it's distracting. So I took all practice tests under timed conditions so that I would have the timing down and wouldn't have to worry about it on test day. In general, I didn't stick to any specific amount of time per passage (i.e. I didn't move on after 10 minutes if I couldn't answer the question). Rather, I looked to see if I was where I wanted to be on average. So when I was a third of the way through on time, was I a third of the way through the passages? If I wasn't, I knew I had to speed up. When I was halfway through on time, was I halfway through the passages?

The reason I like this strategy rather than sticking to some fixed number of minutes for each passage is because some passages will be much easier than others. You'll find yourself familiar with the topic at hand and be able to understand the passage more readily. This goes for both the science and CARS sections. Breezing through the easy passages leaves you time for the harder ones. Put another way, you shouldn't be spending the same amount of time on easy passages as hard ones - that's simply not an efficient use of time on the MCAT. If you allot yourself ten minutes per passage but then mark an answer and have to come back to answer it, that wastes time because you'll have to get re-oriented with the specific passage again and re-read some parts that you might have already pushed out of your mind. That's why I always answer every question per passage before moving on. If I'm unsure, I give it my best guess and mark it and come back to it if I still have time at the end.

I also, overall, didn't get bogged down on specific questions. If I could narrow it down to two or three answer choices (you should be able to for all questions), then I gave it my best guess, marked it for later review (time permitting), and moved on.

I did something similar... 10 minutes on average for each of the passages that were not ridiculously hard.