Tips for the most elusive section of the MCAT

MCAT CARS Tips

Tips for CARS

  • While it’s probably ok to take a break from some of the science subjects while you’re working on something else for the MCAT, you never want to lose your momentum on CARS. A lot of the patterns and mistakes you make are only easy to see if you can track them day after day, and by taking long breaks between CARS sessions, you won’t be able to really understand what’s going wrong since the issues may be new every time.

    What I usually recommend is having most days you aim to do 1-3 passages, and then once a week doing a full 9-passage block. That way you’re not losing progress in between your big CARS practice sessions.

  • This is a 7.5-8 hour exam, and if you only begin working on CARS shortly before your exam, you may not have the mental capacity to read that many (often) boring passages right in a row. Just like prepping for a marathon, it takes time to be able to sit in a chair and read that many words in a relatively short amount of time, and you’ll want to start prepping for that mental challenge as soon as you can.

    Likewise to my point about making it a daily habit, this also means that if you take a pretty long break from CARS, you’re probably going to lose a bit of that stamina. It’s important to prep your brain for this exam, and for CARS, treat it like you’re about to run a marathon.

  • While this advice applies to (and is mentioned in several other places in my website) the entire MCAT, it’s an important thing to keep in mind when beginning your CARS practicing.

    The best answer choice is one that: relates back to the passage, only contains factual/correct information (based on what you’ve been told), and answers the question. Most people are pretty good about getting down to two good answer choices, and by sifting through what’s left to see which answer choice checks those three boxes the best can help eliminate any internal bias or mistakes you may be making.

  • Again, this is also true for the entire exam, but going through the answer choices with the intent of proving them wrong will help you from picking something you’ve already ruled out. Once you are confident that there is a better answer choice, rule the worse one out!

    You can even think of picking your answer choices as picking the “least-worst” answer choice!

  • Closer to your exam you’ll want to try to time every single passage/CARS block you do just to make sure you’re not grossly out of time with the constraints of the exam, but during most of your practice, feel free to try doing passages both timed and untimed.

    Timed practice will probably cause you to be a bit more inaccurate, so you’ll catch yourself making assumptions you can’t be making, but it’ll also begin to reinforce an internal clock that knows when it’s time to move on from a question. Untimed practice is your chance to truly get in an practice your strategies and mental pathways to refine the most accurate way for you to get answer choices that you can work on speeding up in timed practice.

  • On the MCAT, you don’t get points for leaving questions blank or answering more difficult questions, so try to do all of the easier questions first! If it’s been 2 minutes and you still are unsure of a question, pick the answer that you feel the best about, flag it/write it down, and move on with your life.

    When I was heavily tutoring for the MCAT, I actually graphed the amount of time each question took vs the accuracy of those questions and found that there is 0 correlation between how long you spend on a question and the likelihood you get it right. It’s a timed exam, and the longer you spend on a question that you’re not likely to get right in the first place, the more time you’re taking away from other questions you probably have a much better chance on.

  • Since the passages will each have a different number of questions, this 10 minute time-limit can be slightly flexible, but you want to use 10 minute checkmarks to make sure you’re doing the 9 passages on time, rather than tracking how much time you’ve spent per minute.

  • If there are multiple people or ideas present in a passage, make sure you can understand each of their view point. Does the author agree with them? Does this person the author just mentioned support the main idea of the passage? Do these two people agree with each other?

    Often the MCAT will ask questions that require you to gauge whether or not two people agreed with each other, or will ask you to guess whether or not someone mentioned in the passage would support some random, seemingly non-related quote. If you try to make sure you’re keeping track of everyone’s viewpoint, these questions and tracking the main line of the passage get easier.

  • By strategy, I mean things like deciding how fast you’re going to read passages, if you’re going to take notes/make summaries of paragraphs, reading through the questions first, etc. You won’t know what strategy works best for you until you’ve tried them, and you may be surprised at what works best for you.

    For example, I’m a pretty fast and comprehensive reader, but the tactic that worked best for me was reading through the questions first and taking my time reading the passage, rather than going quickly. I also have had students who hated my strategy, and so we tried something else that worked really well, like reading much faster and taking short little summaries of each paragraph.

    Find what works for you! There’s no “one-size-fits-all” for the MCAT, especially CARS.

  • If the author says something is shiny and an answer choice says it’s expensive, we have no idea if the shiny thing the author is talking about is expensive, so we can’t pick it.

  • The wording they use on the MCAT is confusing a lot of the times, so it may help to try to identify the heart of the question (i.e. what specifically is being asked about) and then rewording and simplifying the question in a way that makes more sense to you.

    This is hard to do at first, but over time, you’ll get better at interpreting the language the MCAT uses and this becomes really easy with practice.

Common things in the passage to look out for

  • Any time they mention someone’s job, highlight it or at the very least take a mental note of it. They may ask about what that person may think of something, but they want you to think of their answer through the lens of their occupation if they’ve mentioned it.

    For example, if they mention that someone is a publisher of novels, but then they’re asking about what that person thinks about some other book, since they’re a publisher, their job (and way of making money) is publishing successful books. So even if they think this new book is dumb, if they think it’ll make money, they’ll publish it.

  • Anything modifying word that is extreme is one you should be cautious of (not entirely rule out or ignore, just be cautious of). Words like, “always, universally, never, etc.” are finite in that they are saying something happens 0% or 100% of the time, so if an answer choice tries to state that the same thing happens “most” of the time, it’s wrong. If the passage told you it happens every single time, then only pick an answer choice that says it happens every single time.

    Likewise, don’t make the opposite mistake, trying to pick an answer choice that states that something “always” happens, when the passage never explicitly stated that it did. Even if the passage seems to sort of imply that something has happened a ton of times, that doesn’t mean that for sure we can state that it always happens.

    For example, if a passage is talking about how people who stayed in Amsterdam were dying of the plague like crazy, even though the implication is that most people died, we cannot say that all people died.

    In general, any time they tell you how often something has happened, take note of it, and make sure any answer choice you pick matches that same language.

  • Often you’ll have a passage that will compare two things together, like two artists. Just make sure that you are sort of keeping a Venn-Diagram running in your head (or in your notes if you decide to take notes) to be sure you’re squared on how the author feels about each individual. They will often try to trick you by swapping up in an answer choice the author’s view point of each thing in the comparison, so it’s important to make sure you know how the author feels about each component of a comparison.

    For example, if the author says Picasso was boring and Van Gogh was eclectic, an answer choice may swap those to say Picasso is eclectic and Van Gogh was boring. They’re hoping to trick you into saying, “yeah I remember the author said one was boring and the other was eclectic” and picking the wrong answer, so make sure you’re keeping track of which is which.

  • Words like, “however, on the other hand, conversely, continually, moreover, etc.” are key words in helping you determine the author’s views on things. Based on the word that the author picked, if it’s a reversal (like “however”), that means they probably feel oppositely of what they’re about to say compared to what they had said before. If it’s a continuation (like “moreover”) that means they probably feel the same way about what they’re introducing vs what they just talked about.

    This is useful especially in passages that you don’t really understand what’s going on, because it allows you to at least understand how the author feels about things. If you understand that the author was in favor of something in the first paragraph, and then starts the second with a “however”, that means they probably feel negatively about the things that are said in the second paragraph, and that may be enough for you to answer any questions that may arise about the info in either of those two paragraphs.

  • Sometimes it’s hard to track the tone of the author, but if you carefully look at the words that they are using, they’ll often slip in an adjective or two that will have enough of a connotation that you can get a good idea.

    For example, if an author states that, “the bread was incredibly dry”, the use of incredibly tells you that they feel strongly about it. If they said “the bread was unfortunately dry”, that instead leads you to believe that they wanted it to be good but it wasn’t, which is a bit of a different viewpoint that outright hating it in the former example. Weird example but I’m hoping you can see that adjectives can be really important in helping you decipher the tone of the author or people who are speaking.