Some say they pay the ghosts of old English writers. Others think that they are excerpts from retired CIA torture manuals. All we know is.... that they suck.
Yep. CARS passages are quite possibly the most painful reading possible which makes answering questions on them even worse.
But the AAMC does this on purpose so let’s explore how the AAMC builds passages and why it's important for us.
To begin with, the AAMC can do a lot of things but they can’t write CARS passages. CARS passages used on the exam are excerpts that are taken from a wide variety of sources and then modified to fit.
Generally speaking the word count is limited to 600 but they can modify excerpts in a number of ways. Changing words, moving paragraphs, creating their own indentations, skipping material etc. So they have some options available to them but also have to work with the material they are given.
This is actually in the students favor because it prevents the AAMC from building their own made from scratch passages and then creating highly subjective questions and answers.
So let's think like the AAMC for a bit.
We need to find passages that are challenging and create questions off of them. The AAMC doesn’t want us to win, but at the same time they can’t ruin our scores to the point where their bell curve collapses so they can’t just find the hardest material and use it.
By AAMC’s own rules students are expected to EXCLUSIVELY use passage knowledge in order to answer CARS questions. There is no outside knowledge allowed. So the passages need to contain ALL the information needed to answer questions.
In addition, the questions created have to be CONSISTENT they can’t make up a random question type for every single new piece of information in the passage. This helps preserve the curve, make it easier to create questions for the test writers, and make passage selection easier.
As you can see it’s really difficult to balance all these goals, especially when dealing with passages from every single type of published material. But what if we had a group of elements that were common to passages in general?
If we had a general group of passage elements(remember stuff like figurative language from high school?) that were consistent among passages we could pick passages that contained a good number of them. This would allow our question writers to adjust the difficulty of the questions without being inconsistent.
Fun fact, the AAMC does have a strict selection for these
passage elements and in our learning theory we call them
TESTABLE CONCEPTS
We call them testable concepts because they are bits of information found in the passage that the AAMC can easily use to form a question, answer choice, or act as evidence for questions/answers.
In C/P, B/B, and P/S testable concepts look slightly different; you can read about them here.
Through our work analyzing and breaking down thousands of CARS passages we realized something interesting. The passages AAMC chooses have a very specific assortment of testable concepts that it seems their test writers prefer.
AAMC CARS Passages have a VERY
distinct assortment of testable concepts
when compared to other third party CARS material.
While this list is not all inclusive we found that the most popular testable concepts that AAMC prefers are :
Time stamps
Lists
Nouns
Authors statement of opinion/fact
Arguments for/against
Cause, effect, result
Manufactured figures of Speech
Concrete Ideas
*Presented in order from easiest to most difficult to deal with
AAMC can make anything in the passage a “testable” concept if they feel like it, but historically (even when we examined pre 2015 CARS passages) they always stick to using/testing information related to the ones we listed above more than anything else.
This type of fundamental knowledge is the key for average students who are struggling to really increase their passage reading capabilities.
AAMC picks passages with certain types of passage elements in them
these testable concepts then become the foundation for question writing
Once students properly learn the mechanics behind each of these testable concepts it’s almost as if every CARS passage becomes “clear”. For example, why are philosophy passages so hard?
It’s not just because of the dense subject matter. AAMC also likes to pick passages with different distributions and amounts of testable concepts to balance the test. An easy to medium passage on average has about 20-30 testable concepts but a hard passage can have over 50.
The composition of the testable concepts in a passage also matters significantly. If we had 20 nouns and a few lists, the passage would still be fairly easy to understand. But what if we had 20 different instances of arguments for/against combined with a few authors' statements of opinion/facts?
Variance in testable concept composition is a key factor in CARS passage difficulty ratings and is a component students often overlook since they aren’t taught how to identify testable concepts.
We have found that proper instruction in testable concepts(along with many other reading skills) is crucial and greatly contributes to the four foundations of CARS growth. Passages will no longer be overwhelming because students will be able to use proper highlighting combined with experience to decipher the passages in an entirely new light.
We would love to explain all the testable concepts in detail here but there's a TON of material behind them(they only are you know… the foundational elements of all CARS passages) so almost 50% of Module 1 of our CARS course is dedicated to teaching testable concepts because they have that much importance.
In fact when we built module 1’s practice exercises, we exclusively focused on reading skills and identification/understanding of testable concepts within a passage based context.
The last three testable concepts in particular, #5-8, are well known for showing up in high volume on the hardest passages and many students aiming for the 90th percentile focus very heavily on them. They are also part of module 1 so feel free to go through the sample material for those lessons that's included with module 0 of our CARS course if you are interested.
Learning the fundamental basics of how AAMC builds the exam is really important as an average test taker because we have to work much harder than others to achieve high scores. Feel free to check out any of our free strategy courses(Module 0 of the CARS course is included) and hopefully this information will help you gain an edge over the AAMC.
