A CARS score that refuses to go up is just like Orgo 2.
It sucks.
Breaking through a CARS plateau is particularly frustrating for average students so let’s talk about why it occurs and how to fix it.
A CARS plateau is basically an extended period of time where a student seems to be making no progress in CARS. This is judged either on subjective or objective criteria. Subjectively students will feel more “in control” of CARS passages and more comfortable with different passage types of varying difficulties.
Score plateaus are a natural part of CARS growth
and happen to EVERY student
Objectively students measure performance through timing data, #correct, and application of strategy. Objective measure can be very tricky to use since many CARS passages are written by idiots and the AAMC has a non linear grading scale.
These factors make it harder to accurately gauge CARS performance since you can actually do better on a section but get a lower scaled score than you did previously.
Regardless of whether the plateau is an “illusion” or a real thing it's very important that students are combining their practice volume with a very thorough multi system review of their performance.
But let’s imagine that a student is doing a very comprehensive review of their practice passages and not improving, what could be the issue?
1.Training volume
One of the first things we look at is over/under training. Most students get along well with 1-2 passages a day when they first start CARS training and typically increase to 2-3 passages per day 6-8 weeks before their exam.
We have found that if students train less they aren’t gaining enough experience but if they over train(4-6 passages per day every single day) they aren’t giving themselves enough time to process that experience and their skills don’t grow. Striking a balance between practice and growing skills is really important. Remember, full length tests and practice sections are showcases of your skill , not places to learn the technique.
2.CARS Competency
But what if you are really good at reviewing your passages and you have an appropriate volume of practice but you still aren’t improving?
The next thing we look for is how long has a student been “CARS Competent”.
A student is “CARS Competent” when they can
read the passage and answer all the questions
of a CARS passage in 10~min
Why does “CARS Competency” matter? Think about it like playing a very complicated piece of music. It’s easy to play that piece slowly and notes will be more “accurate”. As you speed up, the complexity of the piece might make it harder for you to play it and you will “miss” more notes.
Remember our discussion about the speed limit in CARS? When doing passages untimed, students typically have a higher accuracy. As they start timing themselves that accuracy actually drops and then steadily climbs back up as they increase their CARS experience.
This trend is a constant in pretty much every student we have ever worked with so if it hasn’t been long since you became “CARS competent", we wouldn’t be worried about the plateau at all.
3. Individually Weak Areas
So alright, what if a student has great reviewing skills, appropriate practice volume, and has been CARS competent for a long time(1-2 months) and their scores still aren’t improving? These are usually the rarer cases and are much tougher to iron out since CARS is so subjective.
We would recommend that students that are in this category review the four foundations of CARS growth and see where they are lacking. By reviewing the foundations students can see in which of the area(s) they are relatively weak in and then put more effort in that sector.
For example, a student that has great strategy but has noticed they actually miss a lot of testable concepts might want to review them. Or maybe that same student is great with identifying testable concepts but for some reason has never worked on their highlighting mechanics. Shoring up individually weak areas can lead to big point gains.
4. Miscellaneous causes
If students still can’t figure out why their score has stagnated we really urge them to do two things.
The first is to switch up the source of their CARS passages. Different companies and different products within the same company, can be created in absolutely different styles. This can be a significant issue because if a student has only done 100s of passages from a single company's Q bank and has “plateaued” it’s likely that it's the Qbanks fault.
The second thing to do would be to take a break from CARS. I’m sure students probably have some other sections to study for. CARS is one of those weird sections that students just sometimes have magic breakthroughs in so a little time off never hurts.
Summary:
Getting stuck in a plateau with your CARS score is very unpleasant but from our experience with thousands of students we know that no plateau is permanent. Feel free to use the tips and tricks above to help guide your journey out of the plateau and if you want to learn more about the dreaded CARS plateau you can always check out our free lesson on it as part of Module 4 of our CARS course.
We have tons of other free strategy courses to help you so check them out as well and hopefully they give you an edge on test day!
