The #1 complaint all students have about CARS is that there is “never enough time" to finish the last few passages. We agree. So we came up with a solution.
At the end of working on a passage for 10 minutes
Take a deep breath
Count to 10
Move on to the next passage
MCAT CARS gives you exactly 90 minutes for 9 passages(10 min per passage). When you exceed the 10 minute time limit you take away time from future passages.
Taking 11 minutes to do the first 3 passages leaves you with 57 minutes for 6 passages:
That's 9.5 minutes per passage.
Pretty good. Who cares about those 3 extra minutes?
Taking 11 minutes to do the first 8 passages leaves you with 2 minutes for 1 passage:
That's only 2 minutes to do passage #9.
WHAT?!!!!?!. Bet you care about those extra minutes now.
A small change in timing causes disastrous results in the long run. It would be nice if we could just speed up in CARS like we do for other sections but we know we can’t do that. Time control is test control especially for average test takers.
It seems stupid to cut off a section at exactly 10 minutes but there is a lot of nuance to the strategy and it's built to work with our strategy for reading passages and answering questions so it actually allows students to cleanly cut at the 10 minute mark and maximize their score instead of losing points.
The AAMC has built CARS to psychologically trick students into wasting time(like those pita 50/50 questions). In order to combat these tricks we built lots of timing strategies to protect ourselves against the AAMC.
If you are interested in the secret 10 second trick for using our “subsection strategy” you can find the lesson for free here.
