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Student’s are often tricked by the AAMC to believe that every CARS question is unique. While it is true that you will never see the same passage again, the way passages are built and the way question answers are built are pretty repetitive. 

This means that while every question might look slightly different from others you have previously seen, they can be SOLVED in a similar fashion.

This idea can be very confusing to students because CARS is viewed as a “subjective” section that is impossible to study for, so how could we use a standardized set of steps to tackle questions? 

Simple:

We create a series of methodical steps that are inherently

“subjective” and allow us to adapt our approach to each 

question in order to maximize our chances of picking 

the best answer.

In C/P we would never tackle an equation based question without a set methodology. But in CARS the basic format is often:

Read passage→read question→read answer choices→select which ones “feels” best→frantically reread passage if we can’t find any that we “feel” are correct→ circle back to answers and pick one we aren’t sure about before moving on.

This approach is what the majority of students have learned through previous standardized exams for reading comprehension. It works well for college courses and SAT/GRE, but MCAT CARS is built to eliminate your ability to find “correct” answers. 

In the vast majority of CARS situations you will be forced to determine the “best” answer among a group of generally garbage answer choices. In situations where you are graded on not finding a “good” answer but just the “least worst” answer, you need a systematic method for deciding which answers are “worse” than others. 

Naturally intelligent students don’t use an explicit answering method because they have a very high intuitive grasp of the passage which allows them to solve questions faster and more accurately than us. For average students, having a CARS Answering method is one of the quickest ways to rapidly increase scores. 

The preferred way MCATSavior teaches answering methodology is as follows:

*If you are curious about small/large scale you can read about it here. 

Of course we don’t expect students to learn the method just by looking at a picture. The entire module 2 of the MCATSavior CARS course is dedicated to explaining each step individually with practice examples and then working our way up to put it all together. You can view the free CARS sample lessons right here. 

As you can see the steps aren’t a “rigid objective” process. They are meant to be fluid and adapted to each question individually. At the same time they give students a very useful series of mechanics to apply in order to crack questions step by step. 

One of the most common issues students report on test day is the “brain freeze” that occurs when you're under an immense amount of test pressure and nothing seems to be clicking on a CARS passage. Students who train rigorously with the CARS answering method often do a lot better than untrained students in these situations because their habits kick in and they have steps to fall back on. 

Will this help students get every question correct? That's a 100% NO!

The goal of the answering matrix is to create a systematic way of eliminating answer choices and evaluating competing answers to determine which one is the “best”. It can certainly maximize our chances of getting the best answer(especially in rigged 50/50 questions) but of course it won’t guarantee us getting the question correct. 

For average students who constantly hovered in the low 120’s despite adequate CARS training volume and sufficient review process, we found that giving them a method to answering questions was often the most important factor that led to their scores increasing.

It’s definitely difficult to explain it all within a single blog post, so feel free to just watch the free lessons on this topic and see if you feel like it can help your score. Also, don’t be afraid to check out all our other free strategy courses to get an edge on test day!