We have talked at length about how the CARS section is a Sport and although it's considered impossible to study for, there are ways to build a foundation for skills based growth. The purpose of this lesson is to shed some more light on the myth that more CARS Practice is the only route to higher scores.
We personally get really ticked off by this myth because it unfairly punishes average students for wanting to do better on this exam.
The first thing to note is a lot of CARS skills are based on innate talent. Individuals with that talent have an easier time making it to the 90th%ile and above. We tend to respect advice from individuals who score high and even though someone who went from a 508 to a 521 in 3 weeks sounds suspicious, we are likely to believe in their tips and tricks.
We also know that since average students don’t have the same levels of innate talent we need to rely on carefully building up our skills in a bottom up manner to compete. But even if we follow this method we still easily get tricked into believing high volumes of practice will directly lead to higher scores.
Don't get us wrong, practice volume is 100% necessary for score increases. We definitely agree with that statement. No matter what cool strategy tricks you have to break down a CARS passage or decipher hot garbage CARS answers, if you don’t have enough real world testing experience, you will fail to apply it(or forget it) on test day where the test can look very different.
This is why we state the AAMC is unfair to average students because students with greater levels of innate talent simply just “pick up” improvements and apply strategy flawlessly without having to explicitly work on it.
In order to compete, average students need to develop a very systematic way in which we both do adequate passage practice and REVIEW those passages. Otherwise, repeatedly doing practice passages in high volume with insufficient review will get you caught in an endless feedback loop where your score just plateaus.
Most of the methods we use to review CARS Passages focus heavily on whether we got an answer correct and why. But remember, in order to get that answer we had to use a slew of passage based reading skills and question answering skills.
Students need to make sure they are explicitly incorporating review of their applications of THEIR SKILLS into their assessment of passage performance. For example, if we forget to use our timing strategy we need to make a note of that in order to work on it in the future. Just reviewing the correct answer and comparing it with ours is insufficient for long term growth. Tracking both skills use and accuracy is the optimal solution because growing our skills in CARS will increase our accuracy down the line.
Having solid foundational skills in CARS is NOT the same
as remembering to use them on every passage.
Learning strategy is easy.
Remembering to apply it is the hard part.
It is too easy to get so caught up in our “final score” that we forget that there were many skills that brought us there. Our in depth review of how we apply our skills will be the key to our growth as a student and the most consistent way to unlock the benefits of high volume CARS practice.
Our own students that take our course often suffer from the same dilemma so here is how we believe students should fix it.
Steps To Maximizing CARS practice and REVIEW
Make sure to have a strong foundation in basic CARS skills. You can find all our free strategy/instructional material for CARS right here.
Slowly ramp up passage reading skills by refusing to do the associated questions.
Students should focus on reading skills and timing using quarter sized passages,
half sized passages, then three-quarters to full size passages as they get more comfortable. All of this should be untimed to allow skills to develop without pressure.
Slowly add in questions as you become more comfortable reading. Make sure you are still doing everything untimed.
Once you become comfortable doing a passage + questions untimed start slowly taking less and less time to complete it.
Follow up all passages with a thorough review of not just answers but each of the following components as well:
Passage reading skills/ understanding
Application of question answering methods
Application and adherence to timing rules
Sharpen foundational CARS skills outside of timed passages by using practice passages that are untimed to allow you to focus on skills work.
Repeat as needed
This is a very shortened version of how we recommend students to maximize benefits from their CARS practice. We believe the steps that are often missed the most (and have the most benefit) are steps 6,7 and 8.
Many students finish the strategy and skills lessons once and never return to them again but like we said, having strategy is useless if we don’t remember to apply it during the passage.
While more CARS practice doesn’t directly equal high scores for average students, if we can learn to step back and incorporate a more thorough review process combined with a constant analysis of how we can better use our fundamental skills, we believe that it will be much, much easier to increase our CARS scores with sufficient practice.
If you are interested in learning more about high spec reviewing skills for the CARS section check out the free lessons we have available from Module 4 of our CARS course which is all about Reviewing CARS.
We have tons of other free resources too so feel free to give them a glance and we hope they help give you an edge on test day!
