Would you like to learn a magic trick?
For our students this technique is the closest you can get to a magic trick on the MCAT and many students have seen their scores jump a few points after learning how to apply it.
Here's the theory behind it.
All the free MCAT strategies we teach sound very cool, but it takes a while for students to see significant score increases. This is because strategy needs to be combined with practice to gain experience(and lots of content).
Rearranging CARS questions also requires significant practice but students typically see results much quicker since it's very easy to implement.
If you remember the theory behind how AAMC distributes passage difficulty, you won’t be surprised to find out they manipulate the question order as well.
Hard questions are typically moved to the front
to bleed out time and make it more challenging
to solve easy questions successfully
In C/P, B/B, and P/S this isn’t much of an issue because the difference in time spent on an easy vs a hard question is very large. Even if you get blocked on a hard question, if you follow proper timing strategy you can make up the time later because you will run into questions that can be solved quickly (under 30 seconds) and add to your “time bank”.
In CARS this is not possible because the difference in time spent on an easy vs a hard question is very small. This means that once you fall behind doing questions, it’s hard to catch up since you won’t run into many questions that can be solved quickly.
This is particularly dangerous for students because spending too long on questions is the most common reason we destroy our time bank in CARS. Once we have destroyed our time we fall prey to the AAMC’s test design and end up speeding through passages which ruins our comprehension(and our scores).
It’s a vicious cycle and the key to stopping it is to rearrange the questions within the CARS passages. We have tons of learning theory behind this within our CARS course, but we are going to provide a simple overview as follows:
AAMC utilizes two primary styles of questions; reasoning beyond and reasoning within the text. These styles actually can be distributed along a spectrum of “small scale to large scale” type questions.
Small scales contain the locations of specific text areas needed to answer questions. Large scales don’t. Large scales typically require you to use your own internal reasoning or scattered passage evidence.
Small scales take less time to complete than large scales and students get them correct much more frequently on average than large scale questions.
By rearranging the questions in each passage we can do the small scales first and maximize our scoring potential.
We can then distribute the remainder of our 10 minutes per passage + questions to the large scale questions. If we can’t solve them in a reasonable time, cut the passage off and move to the next one.
This approach of cutting a passage off might seem brutal but as student we have to always ask ourselves:
Do we want to answer 48/53 CARS questions and get 44 correct? Or
Do we want to answer 53/53 CARS questions and get 42 correct?
*Please note this is an example for thinking purposes, students should never
leave any question blank on test day.
This might seem like an odd concept but every minute we spend on a question we can’t solve is a minute we could spend on a question we can.
We aren’t saying students should blindly cut off questions at the 10 minute mark. We typically recommend that students cut them off after exhausting their CARS answering matrix.(but of course stay as close to the 10 minute time limit as possible)
In CARS the large scale questions are typically the hardest questions possible with the lowest accuracy rate. We found through our experience with thousands of students that test takers always either solved large scales in under 2 minutes, or stalled out as they sat there to think of ways to break down the question.
This approach is ok if you are a 90th percentile scorer and are hunting for the last few points in the section. If you are not on that level yet, you can gain more points by cutting large scale questions off once you aren’t making progress on them and “saving” that extra time.
The time saved can then be distributed to reading more passages and doing more small scale questions because remember, EVERY question on this exam is worth the same amount of points.
Why struggle for 1 large scale when you can answer 2 small scales?
It’s a tough skill to learn but CARS is a sport so working on these skills over time will allow you to use them more efficiently. If all this seems a little much to take in, we understand. We recommend you check out the free lesson on using small/large scale as part of Module 2 in our CARS course(comes included with all the other free strategy courses) to help illustrate the theory even more.
Students can always be a little uncomfortable when making rational trade offs, but students who get used to that discomfort can often use the four foundations of CARS growth more effectively than their peers and increase their scores.
We hope this lesson has given you some interesting insight and feel free to check out all our other free strategy courses as well to help you get an edge on test day!
