Serious touble with CARS

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Lea102

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Whenever I take a practice test, cars kills me every time. I've taken maybe 5-6 practice tests (aamc and kaplan) and I've held a stagnant 124 for cars.

I get decent scores on my other sections though. My most recent aamc scored for Chem/phys, bio/biochem, and psych is 127, 128, 128 respectively (with 10-20 min left for each section). For cars I always struggle to finish on time, and end up guessing for 1-2 passages.

I've looked all over other forums for help and I've done so much practice with cars, but I just can't completely understand those convoluted passages. I honestly feel so frustrated at this point. :(

Is there anyone else who is/was in a similar situation as me and who overcame their cars struggle? How did you do it??

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Don't worry yet.. CARS was my lowest scoring section on many practice tests and it ended up being my highest score on the real mcat. What helped me was doing at least one practice cars section a day (you don't have to only do it when you do a full practice test). I suggest finding as many passages as you can and breaking them up so you do timed sections here and there every day. Then it is essential to go over every section you complete and review what you did right AND wrong. If you don't thoroughly go over this, then you won't know what types of questions you do well on and which you miss every time. I suggest looking at the CARS section in either the Kaplan books or the Kaplan 528 book. They give you ways to label each type of question so you can pinpoint your problem area. One helpful thing I did was to try different timed passages/sections for cars using different techniques. (ex: for one, I would highlight only transition words, for another I tried writing paragraph summary sentences). You can find advice on different methods in the Kaplan books and then find which method works best for you!
 
Don't worry yet.. CARS was my lowest scoring section on many practice tests and it ended up being my highest score on the real mcat. What helped me was doing at least one practice cars section a day (you don't have to only do it when you do a full practice test). I suggest finding as many passages as you can and breaking them up so you do timed sections here and there every day. Then it is essential to go over every section you complete and review what you did right AND wrong. If you don't thoroughly go over this, then you won't know what types of questions you do well on and which you miss every time. I suggest looking at the CARS section in either the Kaplan books or the Kaplan 528 book. They give you ways to label each type of question so you can pinpoint your problem area. One helpful thing I did was to try different timed passages/sections for cars using different techniques. (ex: for one, I would highlight only transition words, for another I tried writing paragraph summary sentences). You can find advice on different methods in the Kaplan books and then find which method works best for you!

Thank you so much for your reply :) I will definitely try different techniques on each passage like you did. And it made me feel better that there is hope that I can still do well on cars!
 
Get the examkrackers verbal, research, and math - 2015 mcat edition. It will help so much!! It made everything really simple and easy to understand for me. That book + practicing everyday + not being intimidated by cars = success.
 
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