MCAT - CARS

[Sneaky Sloth]

Hi,

So I am planning to take my MCAT in mid-May and I am currently in a state of distress. I started studying in December, and while I have seen my scores improve in C/P, Bio, and P/S, I have been consistently doing poorly in the CARS Section.

I bought my books from The Berkeley Review, so when I reached out the community, I was told that their CARS book is generally convoluted and unrepresentative. So I was recommended the EK101 book. In the few weeks that I have had this book I have probably done around 40-50 of their passages, but performing only slightly better. Attached is a picture of my 5 most recent attempts at these EK101 passages and their respective breakdown.

When I first starting studying for CARS, I would do all 9 passages at a time, under timed conditions. I actually would make the time limit, but I would only get ~23 right, so not very good. I switched to only doing a couple at a time and trying to focus more when I got the EK101, which is what I think improved my score a little, but I have reached a plateau.

At this point, I will take any resource/advice/tip/suggestion/etc. that I can get. I have read the 30-day CARS strategy from TestingSolutions as well, which also helped when I transition to EK101.

Thank you for your time.

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[Medical Muse]

The hard part of preparing for CARS is that it is testing you on your skill in determining the main idea of the passage and using that idea in new situations. For the other sections, you can rely on your background knowledge, but for CARS, you only have the skill. Keep practicing passages, but don't worry as much about your score. The goal at this stage is to reliably be able to extract the main idea from every passage you come across. Once you feel comfortable with that, do a AAMC test. The AAMC passages will give you a better idea of your actual score. You have a couple months to increase your score. If you dedicate the time to critically reading, I'm sure you can bring your CARS score up. Good luck!

 

[Sneaky Sloth]

The hard part of preparing for CARS is that it is testing you on your skill in determining the main idea of the passage and using that idea in new situations. For the other sections, you can rely on your background knowledge, but for CARS, you only have the skill. Keep practicing passages, but don't worry as much about your score. The goal at this stage is to reliably be able to extract the main idea from every passage you come across. Once you feel comfortable with that, do a AAMC test. The AAMC passages will give you a better idea of your actual score. You have a couple months to increase your score. If you dedicate the time to critically reading, I'm sure you can bring your CARS score up. Good luck!

Hi, thanks for your reply. I am going to do an AAMC practice test in a few weeks during my Spring break. In the event that I still don't do so well, what do you recommend me doing?

 

[Medical Muse]

While you continue to practice passages, go back over the ones you've done before to see if you truly understood the main point of the passage. In my experience, you can answer about 80% of the questions in CARS just by picking the one that's closet to the main idea. I liken it to knowing why a patient came into see you in the clinic. If you understand his or her concerns, you can address them in a meaningful way. If you don't know why he or she is there, there's a good chance you've focused on the wrong things and potentially arrived at the wrong diagnosis.

If you are still unhappy with your performance later, look for patterns in the types of passages or questions that cause you difficulty. You may want to change how you approach them to prevent mistakes. For example, when I read philosophy passages, I almost always take a look at the questions first. This helps me know which details will be tested and I ignore the other ones and focus my energy on understanding the main idea. CARS is a big picture test. Don't worry about the details (if they test you on them, it's open book) and step back instead. See how the whole passage comes together to make an argument and know what that argument is.

 

[El-Rami]

Man, I still remember CARS when I took the MCAT in 2016. I am not aware of the practice exams that AAMC provides right now, but that first practice exam they released for the new 2016 MCAT had a CARS section that was far easier than what you would realistically see on test day. I scored 94% of the questions right on that section and didn't put much effort into prepping for CARS as I should have. I ended up getting a 125 on that section, on the real thing. I still got into med school (US, MD) with it because my MCAT total score was propped up by my ~90th percentile scores on the hard sciences (128, 129). Still, I was burned by my overconfidence due to a bogus practice exam provided by AAMC. It was the only one they released at the time to give an idea of the new MCAT.

My advice is that you can never over-prepare for that section. You should get your hands on as many CARS practice passages as possible and do them. Start untimed and work on timing later as you improve. You need to master how to approach those questions, and timing is much easier to work on later. Next Step 100 passages, Princeton Review Hyperlearning Verbal Reasoning, and EK101 should be some resources you take a look at. Take time when analyzing EVERY question (right or wrong). Do what you have to in order to get that stuff down, even if you have to go a bit slower. I'm not saying neglect other sections, of course, but CARS is harder to improve on than the other three.

If you have time and exhaust your resources, you could probably take a look at some of the LSAT stuff. I have no idea how well the LSAT passages compare to CARS, so take this with a grain of salt. Still worth doing a little exploring if you have time.

Also, you are asking specifically about CARS, but something I found from personal experience is that my undergraduate research helped me with passages in other sections of the exam. When you have to read academic publications, you learn how to efficiently parse the relevant data, so you can go through the passages more efficiently.

 

[Cornfed101]

Read these Comprehension strategies for CARS.

My recommendation is to use third party passages to improve your reading comprehension but do NOT do the questions. No third party company does CARS questions right and it will do you more harm than good. start going through AAMC CARS qpacks slowly and I recommend going through them again within a week or two of your test. I improved 6 points from initial diagnostic to the real deal. You can improve CARS!

 

[Foggybrain]

Click to expand...

At least for me, progress is slow with MCAT CARS. Keep up the good work.