That's right we said it. But don't worry its not your fault.
This happened because 99% of all CARS instructional material is built from a “Top Down” approach.
This is good for companies who want to sell you products but not for the growth of students' scores.
Let's explore why “Top Down” learning is an issue and what we can do about it.
If you believe us when we say that CARS is a sport that requires application of SKILLS(not knowledge) in unfamiliar situations, it’s very easy to see how a top down approach can go wrong.
Let’s pretend you were forced to play a sport you never heard of before. You are given basic rules, a little bit of instruction, some equipment and then put IMMEDIATELY into an actual game.
You have no idea what's going on but you do some post game review. Next week you go to ANOTHER actual game. After you do this enough times you will get some idea of what’s going on but you lack basic skills and knowledge. Despite wanting to improve you can't grow the fundamental skills you need because you never learned them in the first place. You were expected to just “pick it up” like all the other naturally talented people playing with you.
So next week you make some small improvements and then go back and play ANOTHER actual game. Eventually you just reach a plateau of average performance. Some games are slightly better than others, some are worse but you don’t seem to have any control over how you do.
This is the consequence of top down learning.
In a “top down approach” you start at the end. A student in a sport(CARS)
is expected to play a game (passages + questions) without any
training on the basic skills(for reading passages and answering questions)
and they are simply expected to improve by playing more games (practice passages)
without any focus on their basic skills or fundamentals.
Top Down learning approaches work fantastically well for the content based sections(C/P, B/B, and P/S) because they are knowledge based. In a section that tests application of SKILLS like CARS top down approaches are inherently flawed.
But what if we changed it up a little?
If we wanted to learn a sport a sensible person would probably do the following:
Start from the beginning and expect students to:
Learn basic skills and rules step by step.
Then work up to more advanced skills slowly.
We would then put all of those skills together to play the game effectively.
Work our way up to practice games.
Then actual games, competitions, championships etc.
The example above is a fantastic illustration of how “bottom up” learning works in practice.
If you were the student in question, which of the two learning methods would you prefer?
The MCATSavior course is built from the ground up using “bottom up” principles which is a key reason why students love it so much. If you are an average student who thinks its "impossible" to study for CARS, changing the way you are learning CARS might just be the key to unlocking your full potential.
If you would like to see a full exploration of the learning theory behind MCATSavior's CARS Course you can actually access the entire Module 0 of the CARS course completely for free to see why we do things the way we do and how it can benefit you.
We want students to ace this exam no matter what so hopefully all our free strategy courses allow you to beat this exam once and for all!
