Going to a casino is more fair than MCAT CARS.
No seriously.
Previously we talked about how AAMC cheats students with 50/50 questions but in CARS these questions not only waste your time they are also basically “rigged gambling”.
And the House (AAMC) always wins.
You can read about how AAMC builds CARS answer choices but in a nutshell, many medium/hard questions are built to easily eliminate 2 answer choices. This leaves you with a 50/50 selection that requires intense critical reasoning
You feel ok because you have AT LEAST a 50% chance of picking the correct answer right?
Unfortunately through our practice with thousands of students we found a disturbing trend in MCAT CARS:
Students get 50/50 questions correct
MUCH LOWER than half the time
If 100 students did a CARS question that only had 2 answer choices we would expect about 60-70% to pick one answer and 30-40% to choose the other.
Statistically this seems impossible. It SHOULD be 50/50 right? In C/P this would be odd but in CARS it makes perfect sense.
CARS is SUBJECTIVE. There are no TRUE
50/50 questions due to passage information
What we mean with this statement is simple: CARS passage analysis and question answering is “subjective” and based on the personal interpretation of both by the individual test taker.
The problem is that the answers are created meticulously by AAMC to have a single “best” choice with supporting criteria written by exam makers.(this is why students can choose the wrong answer for the right reasons)
This means that in any “50/50” situation in CARS there will always be some hidden piece of passage information or inference required to reach the correct answer.
As average test takers, sometimes we are seduced by the appearance of these so-called 50/50 situations but the answer choices can be set up in such a way to make certain choices more “appealing” based on our passage reading and AAMC knows this.
Those “appealing” answers are often wrong because the AAMC set up the “less appealing” answer to have more hidden passage evidence. More students actually end up selecting the wrong answer than the correct one even though we had a “50/50” chance.
AAMC has rigged the game so what do we do?
The best defense against these rigged 50/50 questions is to have a dedicated approach to utilizing explicit and implicit passage based evidence to give ourselves the best chance of picking the correct answer.
These question types are just one more example of how the AAMC unfairly tricks test takers and here at MCATSavior we want to make sure students are prepared for them. If you want more information regarding the AAMC’s tactics feel free to check out our free strategy courses and hopefully we can avoid their cheap tricks on test day!
