Dying. Actually you know what?
The philosophy passages are probably worse.
But you know what’s worse than one philosophy passage?
How about an entire section full of them like on the recent MCAT exams?
It’s no secret that the MCAT gets harder every year. As students get better at the exam, AAMC has evolved new tricks to deflate students' scores.
Some of these tricks are easy to spot like “rigged” 50/50 questions or questions in which all the answer choices are hot garbage.
But the most devastating change is the rise of “hybrid style” passages. These are passages that are written on non-philosophy topics but are as hard or harder to read than actual philosophy passages.
By 2017 most test takers realized philosophy passages were bad news thanks to their dense material and high time consumption. Anyone with half decent testing strategy began to move passages or rearrange questions to avoid them. It was easy to avoid them because they were easy to identify.
Students began to do better in CARS so the AAMC got jealous.
To ruin our fun they modified their passage selection style to select for passages that are as difficult as philosophy but don't “look” or “sound” like philosophy. Without an easy way to tell, students started falling prey to these “hybrid style” passages which were insanely difficult to do and ate up lots of time(the loss of which of course leads to more test pressure and lower scores).
The AAMC has a strict group of core elements( we call them testable concepts and we highly recommend you read about them) that dictate their passage selection.
Philosophy passages are hard not just because the writing is dense, but also because they contain testable concepts that are more difficult to decipher and a greater number of them than an average passage.
Hybrid style passages will have DIFFERENT TOPICS than philosophy
style passage but they will contain almost IDENTICAL TYPES and NUMBERS
of high level testable concepts
With the hybrid style passages all AAMC has done is change the wrapping paper to hide difficult passages but it’s actually super effective against us.
Students in the past 5 years of MCAT testing have reported increasing numbers of hybrid style passages every year.
At MCATSavior we are very focused on creating an aggressive test taking strategy to allow average students to compete against the AAMC and have designed a way to identify hybrid style passages before they become an issue.
If you are interested in our methodology check out our free lesson on identifying passage types in Module 3 of our CARS Course.
We have tons of other awesome free strategy courses available as well. We hope this information is super helpful and gives you an edge on test day!
