- Hi everyone and welcome to another video
from the MCAT team here at Shemmassian Academic Consulting.
I'm Vikram Shaw,
and in this video series,
we'll be answering some commonly asked questions
about the MCAT.
Today we'll be discussing several reasons
why CARS might be your worst scoring section on the MCAT.
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Many students whether they're just starting
their MCAT preparation,
or months into their journey
are apprehensive of CARS.
The critical analysis and reasoning section
were often referred to as CARS,
is essentially a test of verbal reasoning.
You may have encountered similar sections
when you took the ACT or SAT.
However, the questions presented on the MCAT CARS section
tend to have a few major differences.
Questions on the MCAT CARS section
include passage based questions only.
Questions based on long-form written passages.
And each passage contains five to six questions.
In contrast to standardized test questions
you may have seen in high school,
there are no standalone test questions
within the MCAT CARS section.
Each and every CARS question
is associated with the passage.
And there are on average five to six questions
presented with every passage
for a total of 53 questions within a section.
This unique format
can make this seemingly
simple verbal reasoning section extremely challenging.
You might be practicing
one MCAT CARS passage after another
and not seeing any improvement.
In the next few minutes,
we'll discuss several reasons
why CARS might be your worst section on the MCAT.
Reason number one,
the other MCAT sections test your content knowledge.
The other three sections
include chemistry and physics or C/P.
Biology and biochemistry or B/B.
And psychology and sociology or P/S.
These sections test students' knowledge
of scientific content
and require knowing quite a bit of content knowledge.
The amount of content knowledge
tested on each subsection varies.
But given that these subjects
also carries significant overlap with most pre-med courses,
you probably already know a lot of the information
from the undergraduate classes you've taken.
Simply knowing the content knowledge
without applying any particular strategy
may be enough to lead you to score 125
or even higher on a particular subsection.
In other words,
your content knowledge
can overpower your strategy deficiency
and allow you to score reasonably well
despite not having an effective MCAT test taking strategy.
So, what does this mean for your CARS score?
If your scores on the three content-based sections
are consistently higher than the score on your CARS section,
then your pre-existing content knowledge
is likely helping
to keep your science section scores afloat.
However, there may still be a larger
underlying strategy weakness
that's deflating all four of your subsection scores
and impacting your CARS score the most.
Reason two, CARS deliberately excludes
any outside content knowledge.
In contrast to the three science sections,
the CARS section will only test you
on the passage that's provided.
In other words you're tested on what you get.
This means that all of the questions
that are associated with the passage
should only be answered
using information from the text
and without using any outside knowledge at all.
It's very easy to forget this fact
when answering CARS questions.
Often students will bring their prior knowledge
into a CARS passage.
This might include
knowledge about a historical event or a historical figure,
or even a definition of a vocabulary word.
It can be a major pitfall for a CARS section score,
especially if the author of a CARS passage
is arguing against a commonly held belief or opinion.
As a result,
it's critically important
to understand the main idea of each passage
and exclude any outside knowledge
when answering the questions.
As a side note,
one of the most common questions we get from students
is how to decide on the best answer for CARS
when you've narrowed it down
to two remaining answer choices.
We often hear students tell us
that they always get to this point
and then choose the incorrect answer.
To fix this, we recommend two different exercises.
The first, highlight the direct text evidence
that supports each answer choice
and simply choose the answer choice
with more highlighted evidence.
And number two,
count the number of assumptions
or pieces of external information
you need to arrive at the answer choice
for both answer choices.
You should choose the answer choice
that requires you
to make the smallest number of assumptions.
To demonstrate this,
let's say that for example,
an obviously fake question asks,
"What's the weather like outside?"
And let's say the passage says,
"The trees were frosty."
You would need to make only one assumption.
The trees were frosty because it's cold outside.
If you're making more assumptions,
you're at risk of moving away from the passage information.
For example, what if you say,
"The trees were frosty
because we're located in the Northern hemisphere
so therefore the weather is cold."
Here you're making two assumptions,
based on the passage information
all we can reasonably deduce is that it's cold outside,
but there's no indication
that we're located in the Northern hemisphere.
The MCAT is tricky
and we'll use small details like this
to try and confuse you.
While it might not be this obvious in CARS passages,
if you keep this framework in mind,
you'll start to see where they try to trick you.
Reason number three, absorb the main idea.
If you're not doing well on CARS,
this doesn't mean that you're not an effective reader.
It's much more likely
that there's a weakness in your CARS strategy.
The nature of CARS questions
require that you thoroughly understand the main idea
and supporting arguments in each passage.
The passages that are chosen and adapted for the MCAT
usually have main ideas with lots of nuance.
If you're only reading the texts at a surface level,
you'll be missing this nuance
along with the questions that might test you on them.
One strategy we suggest
to students struggling with main idea,
is to pretend they're reading the passage
to a younger relative or friend,
and will have to explain the passage
to that person afterwards.
In other words, as they read the passage,
they should force themselves to focus more on larger ideas,
transition points and big picture shifts.
If you need to know a small detail,
the question will direct you back
to the specific point of the passage
where you can find the answer.
On your first read,
you need to primarily focus
on understanding the main ideas of each paragraph
and of the passage as a whole.
You should also have a good grasp
on how the paragraphs relate to one another.
And how the author is forming an argument
throughout the course of the passage.
Reason number four,
apply the information from the passage correctly.
Along with understanding the main idea
as you read the passage,
it's also crucial
that you correctly use the information within the passage
to answer questions.
The test writers love to trip students up
by using the right words in the wrong way.
They'll use information or direct quotes from the passage
that students recognize as familiar in what to choose.
However, they'll alter the context or specific words
in a way that makes the answer incorrect.
Be sure that if you choose an answer choice,
you know exactly what it's saying.
A great check is to reread the question one more time
to ensure your answer choice
actually answers the question
before moving on to the next one.
What students often find
is that after they've spent a minute or two minutes
trying to answer a question,
they may have forgotten
what the question is actually asking in the first place.
So in conclusion,
there are several reasons
why your CARS subsection score
might not be as high as you'd like it to be.
To begin to understand why CARS is your worst MCAT section,
it's worth looking at other factors,
such as your scores on the science subsections
and your approach to reading CARS passages
and answering associated questions.
In addition, if you identify a strategy gap
on the CARS section,
fixing this gap
might allow you to simultaneously improve your scores
on other sections of the exam
that you may have simply been overpowering
with your content knowledge.
Now that you understand why strategy is so important
for the CARS section,
we hope you'll be inspired to redouble your efforts
towards finding an effective strategy that works for you.
If you invest the time and effort now
into finding that strategy,
it'll pay big dividends in the future.
We strongly encourage you to check out
our MCAT CARS strategy video
from our 528 series,
that provides several high yield strategies
you can use to work on improving your CARS score.
We hope you enjoyed this video.
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We hope you like thousands of other pre-med students
find these incredibly useful
in your preparation, happy study.
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