Timing on MCAT
- Thread starter gildas
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Keep doing more practice passages. When I first started studying I couldn't even come close to finishing the mini-tests on time. The more you do it, the better you get. You learn how to be faster. Don't worry about it yet... it didn't come together for me until about 6 weeks before the exam.
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Practice. Also, if you're scoring low enough, don't even try to answer a passage by thinking about the questions. Just totally guess on one or two passages, which takes less than a minute, and spend the extra time really rocking on the ones you work at.
First of all, you should SLOW DOWN. This sounds counter intuitive, but you have to. Don't even time yourself at first. It is impossible to improve on mcat verbal if you cannot get answers correct. Slow down and get 95-100% of the answers correct FIRST, THEN speed up. At that point, start timing yourself, and whittle down your time by not rereading the passage. The only time you should reread anything is to find a detail that questions asks for. Otherwise, the rest should be scanning the passage and going off of your circled important words and any symbols you use to signify main point, change in direction/topic, specific detail, etc. And as other posts have suggested, just keep doing practice questions. I am part of the school of thought that general interest reading is very important for improving, accuracy, and precision. If interested, go read some of my threads under "more mcat advice", however, remember, many have differing thoughts about reading general interest for the MCAT. Good luck.
sscooterguy
sscooterguy
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canuli said:
Well He is refering to Exam Kracker's way of doing verbal.
EK says not to underline or circle words but to think about the author. Try to figure out things about the author's age and sex and profession so that you get into the mind of the author and can figure out the point of the passage.
On top of that they say to write down the main point of the passage and try to keep in mind the main idea because everything relates back to the main idea. So don't try to memorize every detail, but try to get the gist of what is being said in the passage, because 90% of the time the answer is something that can be figured out by the main idea.
Furthermore, they say that if you are running out of time, try looking at the question stems, because sometimes you will find that you won't even need to read the passage to be able to understand what they are asking because all the info you need is in the question stems.
Last but not least, they say skipping around to find the easy vs. hard passages is the most counterproductive thing to do. I agree with this whole heartedly.
