MCAT Verbal Practice

[ditritium monoxide]

What is the best practice book or source for practicing on MCAT verbal questions?

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[JessebenBenjamin]

None?
I used EK but I've heard that reading skills is something you either have or you don't... very hard to pull up.

Pretend you are reading an interesting magazine. That helped me a lot.

 

[Josepk2]

Definetly exam crackers! Literally only having read 3 real books in my life the reading section was definitely my weakest section and exam crackers really helped me bring my score up

 

[Dandine]

^ The tips that they gave in ExamKrackers were very helpful. In the end you need to practice reading regardless, but they had some interesting exercises that came in handy for practice sections and exam day.

 

[HybridEarth]

I had a good experience with the Princeton review hyper verbal book or whatever it's called. I bombed verbal the first time I took the MCAT due to sheer unpreparedness of the question styles I'd see on exam day. This book definitely helped me strategy and I did much better. Princeton Review had questions that were most similar to the MCAT aside from practice exams imo. EK book is the runner up... some of their answer choices weren't very clear.

P.S. Stay away from Kaplan verbal. Almost all discrete questions and barely any critical thinking, completely unlike the real deal (I can't speak for the new exam though).

 

[bararaboi]

I liked the HyperLearning PR books. Reading the NY TIMES and New Yorker everyday could help as well.

 

[Lucca]

Read, read read and then read some more. As far as practice passages are concerned, AAMC >> everything else. I think TPR's CARS stuff is pretty good and is slightly more difficult than the AAMC material.

With Verbal I think there are three keys to success: 1. Timing. 2. Having a good testing strategy and being familiar with the way questions are asked and answers are framed and 3. Having strong reading comprehension and verbal skills. 3 is hard to develop in a short period of time (ideally one would be developing this skill throughout their entire education). 1 and 2 can definitely be mastered.

 

[Lawpy]

None?
I used EK but I've heard that reading skills is something you either have or you don't... very hard to pull up.

Pretend you are reading an interesting magazine. That helped me a lot.

I'm not really sure how people don't have reading skills. Sure for ESL, it may take a while to master reading skills for difficult and boring passages, but that doesn't mean reading skills are impossible to acquire. Or even very hard. It just requires much more focused attention and effort.

What is the best practice book or source for practicing on MCAT verbal questions?

AAMC resources are by far the best. But i heard good things about TPR, EK and NS passages, so you can use them for practice.

 

[Bermie]

Verbal was my strongest section and I also had a great experience with TPR hyper learning verbal workbook.