What in the. . .

[theunremarkable]

I know there's a million posts about verbal, but I just wanted to inquire if anyone had gone through this and what they did to overcome it:

I've been practicing verbal for a month now and I'm consistently making 9s and 10s through the EK books. I wanted to increase the score (because my PS is very low) so I thought i would get into the habit of writing the main idea down and pondering it more. My score dropped to a 7!! Not only that, I ran out of time and had to rush through it. I thought this was a fluke and did a second test and had the same result.

Are there any other techniques out there that could help me out? I'm def not going the main idea route any more. . .

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[R.P. McMurphy]

I know there's a million posts about verbal, but I just wanted to inquire if anyone had gone through this and what they did to overcome it:

I've been practicing verbal for a month now and I'm consistently making 9s and 10s through the EK books. I wanted to increase the score (because my PS is very low) so I thought i would get into the habit of writing the main idea down and pondering it more. My score dropped to a 7!! Not only that, I ran out of time and had to rush through it. I thought this was a fluke and did a second test and had the same result.

Are there any other techniques out there that could help me out? I'm def not going the main idea route any more. . .

are you doing bad now simply because you are running out of time? if you are now running out of time and getting the same amount of q's wrong per passage, i would stop your new technique right away

9's and 10's are pretty good, why not just focus on your PS section more?

 

[CopperStripes]

I took the MCAT twice - the first time I got a 10 in verbal, and the second time I took a TPR course and got a 13. I do not think this was luck. I've heard a lot of people slam TPR's verbal strategy, but it worked for me! Keep going with that slowing down and considering the main idea plan that you've been trying. When I started the TPR strategy, I spent quite a number of weeks always running out of time and getting much lower scores than usual. This is normal! After a while, you get the hang of it and will see significant improvement. The process may seem bogus and hopeless once in a while, but give it time.

 

[braluk]

there are alot of differnet strategies for verbal out there. EKs seems to work for a large number of peolpe here who found that kaplans and TPR's verbal strategies were lackluster. Some people found the Kaplan and/or TPR's verbal strategy superb. It's all different, but what all of them have in common is just remembering the big picture, and realizing that the authors of passages all probably make arguments in favor of that big picture. I guess that is the lesson to take away from all these different strategies. At least for me it was.

 

[gujuDoc]

Use whatever strategy was working for you before and focus on getting your PS score up by doing a lot of practice tests and Kaplan or TPR material or EK material in those subjects. I recommend the TPR science workbook and in class compendium or Kaplan topicals and full lengths.

Also keep reviewing over what you are getting wrong and consistently missing.

 

[KeyLime]

I got a 14 VR on the April 06 test, but I was once in your shoes scoring consistant 9-10 on EK verbal.
I combined the EK and TPR verbal methods into a method that worked for me. I found myself going back to the passage a lot more than EK suggests, but I followed the EK method of reading the passages kind of like a newspaper. I circled important dates and important names and some transition words so that they would be easy to find later, but I didn't mark up my passages too much other than that.
I think that my biggest point booster was really working hard to figure out the question "types" that I was missing. The TPR method teaches about different question types like "strenghten/weaken," "Main idea," etc. I found out that I was missing almost all of the questions that asked me to strenghten or weaken based on new information. It takes time to to make a "log" such as this for every practice question that you miss, but it will help you to find any glaring problems.