Hey Tutankh, Ill throw my two cents into your strat & difficulties with VR. But, before I do, lemme give you my background:
I have been in your shoes when it comes to the VR portion of the exam. I am an extremely slow reader and have taken the MCATs three times now where my VR score has maintained a constant 6, while my sciences average between 8-12. My VR scores were not crappy because I didnt practice enough: I have done the entire EK 101 passages book, all of the passages from the Kaplan program, the entire VR book from the Berkely Review and every single practice exam offered by AMCAS. After getting two interviews this past year and not accepted by either, I spoke with the admissions couselors as to what I should do. Both recomended that I retake the MCATs and get my verbal up atleast to an 8 or 9 by adjusting my strat.. With that I retook the exam a fourth time and I am extreemly confident that I attained the target VR score, if not exceeded it. (I took the exam on June 18...should get my scores by July 21st).
The Strategies I have tried:
The first time I took the exam, I used the Kraplan VR method, which is to map out the passage, writing down short phrases for each paragraph to help you remember what the paragraph was about. This, IMO, was a terrible strat. and was only useful on paper based versions of the exam, where you could write your notes directly to the side of the passage.
The second time i took the exam, I practiced using a similar strat to that of Kaplan, except i just tried to keep the topic of each paragraph in my head. I had done extremely well with this on practice exams. But when I took the real exam, the first two passages had something like 9 paragraphs in them, and that just blew me out of the water.
The third time, I threw out all of Kaplan's and tried the EK strat, which focuses a little more on main idea of the passage...The sad part about this exam, I ended up taking it while I was sick, so not only was my reading slower than normal, my attention was constantly being turned to blowing my nose. But, I realized two very important problems with all of my attempts at doing the VR:
1) I had a tendancy to read outloud to myself, which caused my reading speed to decrease significantly (It became very apparent to me when I was sick)...and I think also hurt my comprehension quite a bit because under normal circumstances I dont read to myself out loud.
2) I had been wasting a lot of time and putting a ton of strain on myself in trying to remember dozens of facts within a passage, when in actuality, all I really needed to find were the 5 to 8 facts which the questions referenced.
3) I had a tendency to get stuck on one to two extremely difficult passages which resulted in my running out of time.
So, this brings me to the fourth, and what will be my last time taking the exam. My strat. for this was to go through all of the passages at the beginning and look for the one with the longest and most difficult looking questions. Once I found that one, answer all of the questions with B or whatever, then go back to the first passage and start. For each passage I previewed the questions and picked one to two key words from each question. When I came across something in reference to those words, I highlighted it and read the sentence before and after carefully. This resulted in my only having to remember approximately 5-8 differnt words per passage. I found that looking for specific words/phrases in the passage actually helped me read the passage rather quickly since I could skim the fluff between the starting sentence of a paragraph up until i found a keyword. But also helped me stay focused on the text, so comprehension was rather easy. As far as the reading outloud thing goes, I was able to keep myself from doing it throughout most of the VR section, though from time to time I did find myself muttering to myself.
Most of the time I was able to answer the questions without looking back at the passage, however on the occasion that I did, it was very easy to find the portion of the passage to which the question was in reference to.
Hence, when I finished the VR section, I felt much, much better about it than I had ever before on any practice or previous exam. I did still have to guess completly on half of one passage on top of the 1 i guessed on initially, however that is much better than having to guess on two to three complete passages as I have had to do in the past.
So, my opinion on your strat. about expecting to guess outright on three passages would be to maybe limit yourself to 1, maybe 2 and simply adjust your strat. If you guess on three passages, assuming 6 questions each, you have a 25% chance of guessing each question right. That puts you at getting approximately 4-5 questions right out of the 18. Assuming you dont miss more than those ~13, according to the AAMC MCAT #9 you'll get around a 9. But, if your basing your reading speed and comprehension off of practice exams and what not and not the real exam, from my experience, you'll read even slower on the actual exam because you'll be even more worried about making mistakes and what not. So, yeah I wouldnt outright guess on three passages. I would definately work to adjust your strat.
Also, so you know, I work in a medical school and have talked to probably a couple hundred medical students about their VR strat and very few of them said they actually "read" the passages completely. Most of them suggested variations of skimming the passages.
Once my MCAT scores are posted in a week, Ill try and come back here and post them to give my final strat. some credibility or completely discredit it.
I tried all the various strategies, but I am just not able to get to those passages. My comprehension is very poor and Im a very slow reader. Somehow if I concentrate on a particular essay and take my time on it (>=15 min), then I tend to do better. Based on that I tried to adjust my speed with no luck.
