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Students often feel that the answer choices in CARS make no sense despite students having full comprehension of the passage and the question being asked. This can be frustrating during a real exam where every second counts.

75% of the time spent on a CARS question is typically used to determine which is the “best answer” after all the choices have been read. Students who have trouble selecting an answer often suffer from systemic time issues that cause major problems as the test progresses.

So why do students struggle with answer choices so much? Basically:

AAMC set up their CARS answers to maximize

a students critical thinking skills by utilizing 

suboptimal (think “incorrect” sounding) answers

How does this make any sense? Well think about it this way. 

MCAT test takers are typically pretty smart and many with natural intelligence can score high with minimal training in CARS.

If the AAMC asks a student a CARS question, students at every level can “create” an answer for that question using their passage knowledge. If they were able to find that “correct” answer within the answer choices they would be able to finish the questions very fast.

This would become a problem for the AAMC. 

If they made the test that easy they would not have an acceptable score distribution. In addition, they would not be testing students on advanced critical thinking skills and would face scrutiny as a professional test company.

To avoid these issues, AAMC forces students

to use second and third order critical reasoning

skills to find the “best answer” and not the “correct” answer.

Students are often very confused on the difference between “best answer” and “correct answer”, so here is a good way to think about it:

If you were on a game show and you can spin a wheel to gain/lose money you obviously would want to gain money. (+200$ will at least pay for some AAMC Full length tests)

But what if we were forced to spin a wheel that only had outcomes in which we lost money?. -100$ is pretty bad, but it is better than -200$. The “best” outcome in this situation isn’t great but it's better than the alternatives.

The same principles apply in CARS. 

The key to selecting CARS answers efficiently is not 

to look for the  “correct answer” but rather search for

 the “least worst” or “BEST” answer. 

The answer you end up selecting may not be the “ideal” way you would have answered the question being asked. But as long as the answer you selected answers the question BETTER than the other answer choices it is the “best” answer and most probably the correct one as well.

This is the key to that frustrating feeling you get when you select a CARS answer that you think does a horrible job of answering the question, but the other answer choices sound even worse and somehow you get the answer correct. 

It’s simply how the AAMC decided to build the exam and it often becomes a huge issue on test day when every answer choice just seems “wrong”. 

Students who have exclusively trained on “questionable” third party material are never forced to use these critical thinking skills and have significant score drops when transitioning to the AAMC material. 

Even for students who are trained properly, AAMC's guiding philosophy behind creating “suboptimal” answers and forcing us to choose between them is a huge component of many other common failure points in CARS including:

Why students get CARS questions wrong for the right reasons

Why test day scores look so different from our practices

Why high volume CARS practice doesn't directly correlate with score improvement

And so much more. 

 

While this might seem like a trivial change in perspective, students who transition to this perspective of selecting answers often see rapid growth in CARS. 

This growth is usually best seen when combined with a systematic way of both understanding how AAMC distributes answer choices and a concrete methodology for answering CARS questions. 

If you are interested in this topic feel free to check out our free lesson on it in module 2 of our CARS Course. We hope this has been super helpful and make sure to check out all our other free strategy courses to get an edge on the exam!