Timing

[SensesFail]

I've started timing myself when doing passages (but haven't done any full lenght practice tests yet). Any good strategies on improving efficiency? I find myself consistently completing passages within 10-11 minutes with decent scores on the accompanying questions (mostly 5/6, 6/8, with the occasional 4/8 ).

In the Biological Sciences/Physical Sciences Sections is it better to browse through questions first? I found I improved my timing slightly when I first browsed through the questions and completed the "Pure Science" questions. I then go back and read the passage to answer questions dealing with Experimental Setups. Suggestions to improve timing?

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[ASDIC]

Here s wut I would suggest to improve timing.

For the physical sciences:
1. speed read the passage, extracting as much useful info as possible. Now this takes practice. You want know what the passage is about, what topics in physics and chemistry are they touching on, recall relevant formulas and concepts.

2 Go to the questions, read the question very carefully. Pay attention to the logic of the question stem. If you understand the logic of the stem, you can immediately eliminate many choices. This saves a lot of time.

3. If the question is asking for a hugh calculation, approximate it instead.

For Verbal:
1. This section is a time killer. You have to be careful here. If you can do "speedreading" that will definitely help you. Speedreading is when you can read the passage as fast as possible while noting the main ideas and flows on sides and extracting as much info as possible. Keep an eye for logic throughout the passage.

2. The questions will be tricky because they are more based on logic rather than information on the passage itself. So you shud understand the logic in the question and passage.

For Bio:
1. Recent bio sections look pretty tough (look at AAMC 6R). But here logic instead of bio background prevails.
2. I would advise you to spend more time on the passage based questions than on the independent questions.

Take a course in Logic and Reasoning...it helps a lot.

 

[Medikit]

With PS I found that the more calculations I had to do the more likely I was to go over the time. It's really important to get your rounding and estimating skills down for this section. On the actual MCAT I had about 5-6 minutes left after completing this section. On the Verbal all I can say is do a lot of them. I was doing a verbal passage every morning two weeks before the MCAT. On the real MCAT I had about 4 minutes left, but I spent a lot of it on fixing a bad bubble fill-in job. On the bio I never really had a time problem, but I actually found that I could briefly skim the paragraphs and still answer the problems. On the real MCAT I didn't scan over the information presented at all on a Genetics passage but went straight to the questions and found that this worked very well.