Low AAMC #3 score, Please help, anyone!!!

[wohs123]

Hello SDN, I aspire to be a doctor however when I took my first practice exam, I bombed it. I got a 21 overall score, and frankly I felt so discouraged. I want to do better, and I post gamed by looking over all the questions and figuring out what I did wrong, and what I did right. My test is on september 10 and I am really worried I might not hit above 30 like I wanted. Please offer any help, im open to suggestions. I am currently doing 3 practice exams and one being aamc every week. I plan on doing all of them by the end of this month, and carefully fixing things i missed. My breakdown score is 10, 4, 7 and my question is if i am out of mind thinking that i can score a 30 with this much time or do i have time still to increase my score, please let me know guys...I appreciate the time

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[musicalfeet]

It seems like the largest issue is the verbal section. I'd try to analyze what's going on with the verbal section and see where you're messing up (can you understand the passage? what about the question? What about the answer choices? Is it a reasoning issue? etc). Then, try and do verbal every day for a week and see if you're improving. Verbal tends to be hard to improve (My verbal hasn't moved in a month...I keep missing inference/reasoning questions so I need to figure that out)--but if you can have a "breakthrough", your score will jump a ton. I went from like a 6 Verbal (When I did EK Math+Verbal Study) average to about a 10 once I mastered the "main idea" stuff.

 

[alfredo24pr]

besides verbal, it seems that you are lacking some biological science concepts.
Of course, your score will improve, but with that low verbal it looks like you never practiced verbal and like musicalfeet said, it takes time to improve.

Some overall tips that might help you with verbal is:

1. focus on the main idea and answer according to main idea
2. determine understand the author's tone
3. read the question carefully before looking at the answer choices (sometimes the question alone can give information that will help in answering it)

 

[Doogie17]

you could reach your goal in a month. I went from low 20s on my first practice, then during 5 weeks of study, to upper 20s on a few FL paper tests, then low 30s, then upper 30s on aamc, which is where my actual score ended up, and with a 12 on verbal. I think the biggest thing that helped me after EK1001, was just taking every FL I could find in old prep books, and learning from the wrong answers.

 

[TBRBiosadist]

This has been useful to most. Crossposting from many other places
This strategy got me from a 7 average to scoring 13-15 average..

Spend the bulk of your time reading. Up to 3 minutes per passage.

• Read the first and last paragraph thoroughly to begin with. Understand what the authors main point will be because 90% of questions require nothing more than a general idea.
• After this, read the entire passage slowly enough where you dont feel like you need to reread sentences for understanding.

Next is just answer questions, there is a few tricks here that work about 90% of the time

• Unless the passage is asking you about a specific detail, dont look back. READ EVERY ANSWER THOROUGLY AND THEN Answer what makes sense from the general point of the passage. Its very easy to prove a wrong answer to be somewhat correct if you dig hard enough, dont. Answer what your gut says and move onto the next question, dont contemplate to much. With that being said...
• Answer like you were dropped on the head as a child. Alot of times if Im arguing between two answers, there is the answer that is 100% correct, and one that is 90% correct. Be an idoit and choose the one that seems like it is correct. However.....
• "Always" is a word to avoid. If an answer uses this word, or definites like it, it is something to avoid. I would say 80% of the time the wishy washy answer is more correct then the highly affirmative one. This leads to my final point....
• 100% of the time you are not actually looking for the "right" answer in verbal, this isnt PS or BS where 1+1 almost always equals 2 (unless we are talking about the different sedimentation values for Ribosomes). In verbal you are looking for the answer that isnt wrong. Often times an answer will seem very "right" but one aspect of it is clearly wrong, as compared to an answer that isnt wrong, but doesnt seem as right as that answer, these are meant to fool you. Choose the answer that isnt wrong.

I understand that I few of these tips may be at odds with each other. Ultimately you must adjust slightly for each passage, but it comes down to one thing. Read thoroughly. Read every sentence in the passage. Read every question. Read every answer. Then the correct answer will be fairly obvious. This may seem like it takes longer, but it takes much less time than skimming, and then trying to find the correct information later.

Or to summarize in one sentence

Understand what the hell the author is arguing

 

[wohs123]

Thank all of you for the suggestions, I am doing verbal more now. I am aiming around 4 passages a day, i guess I keep guesing between two answers and I just end up messing up, also im not guessing correctly. Any suggestions in improving bio and physical science?? I really apprecite the time everyone, you guys gave me more motivation..In the end of the day i just want to do well and I appreciate all the constructive criticism..please keep em coming

 

[Dreamstoo]

Hello SDN, I aspire to be a doctor however when I took my first practice exam, I bombed it. I got a 21 overall score, and frankly I felt so discouraged. I want to do better, and I post gamed by looking over all the questions and figuring out what I did wrong, and what I did right. My test is on september 10 and I am really worried I might not hit above 30 like I wanted. Please offer any help, im open to suggestions. I am currently doing 3 practice exams and one being aamc every week. I plan on doing all of them by the end of this month, and carefully fixing things i missed. My breakdown score is 10, 4, 7 and my question is if i am out of mind thinking that i can score a 30 with this much time or do i have time still to increase my score, please let me know guys...I appreciate the time

The biological sciences can be fixed with intensive overdrive of the content review.

This has been useful to most. Crossposting from many other places
This strategy got me from a 7 average to scoring 13-15 average..

Spend the bulk of your time reading. Up to 3 minutes per passage.

• Read the first and last paragraph thoroughly to begin with. Understand what the authors main point will be because 90% of questions require nothing more than a general idea.
• After this, read the entire passage slowly enough where you dont feel like you need to reread sentences for understanding.

Next is just answer questions, there is a few tricks here that work about 90% of the time

• Unless the passage is asking you about a specific detail, dont look back. READ EVERY ANSWER THOROUGLY AND THEN Answer what makes sense from the general point of the passage. Its very easy to prove a wrong answer to be somewhat correct if you dig hard enough, dont. Answer what your gut says and move onto the next question, dont contemplate to much. With that being said...
• Answer like you were dropped on the head as a child. Alot of times if Im arguing between two answers, there is the answer that is 100% correct, and one that is 90% correct. Be an idoit and choose the one that seems like it is correct. However.....
• "Always" is a word to avoid. If an answer uses this word, or definites like it, it is something to avoid. I would say 80% of the time the wishy washy answer is more correct then the highly affirmative one. This leads to my final point....
• 100% of the time you are not actually looking for the "right" answer in verbal, this isnt PS or BS where 1+1 almost always equals 2 (unless we are talking about the different sedimentation values for Ribosomes). In verbal you are looking for the answer that isnt wrong. Often times an answer will seem very "right" but one aspect of it is clearly wrong, as compared to an answer that isnt wrong, but doesnt seem as right as that answer, these are meant to fool you. Choose the answer that isnt wrong.

I understand that I few of these tips may be at odds with each other. Ultimately you must adjust slightly for each passage, but it comes down to one thing. Read thoroughly. Read every sentence in the passage. Read every question. Read every answer. Then the correct answer will be fairly obvious. This may seem like it takes longer, but it takes much less time than skimming, and then trying to find the correct information later.

Or to summarize in one sentence

Understand what the hell the author is arguing

Totally agreed, when I took a few verbal tests for practice last summer, I was skimming and not really trying to understand the passage. I was averaging horrible scores somewhere around 6-7. This summer I changed my approach and have been scoring in the 9-11 range using a very similar approach to yours TBR.

 

[TBRBiosadist]

YaY!

 

[wohs123]

I am going to try your method TBRBiosadist and see where it takes me..I took like a Gold standard and got like 35/52 which looking over it I didnt know many stuff, i mean i forgot specific details..Would you suggest more practice tests will fix that @Dreamstoo