If you look to any source of information, your peer group, online forums, even your premed advisors you might notice that the most “valid” advice comes from those with high scores. This makes sense of course, until you as an average student attempt to apply their study strategies and get absolutely nowhere.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in the CARS section because CARS is dependent on innate intellectual talent more than any other MCAT section. (this is why it's often considered impossible to study for)
Consider this phenomenon:
We take a high school student who scored in the 90th percentile on their SATs/ACTs and make them take C/P B/B and P/S. They will fail with no chance of success because these sections are content based. (If they do well because they have been studying biochem and orgo on the side their life is sad let them have the victory)
What if we take that same high schooler and give them a CARS section? They could actually score in the 100th percentile. CARS does not require any outside knowledge, it's just passage based critical reasoning. A student who scored in the 90th percentile on reading comprehension in SAT/ACT has a good chance of scoring well on a CARS section with no experience.
Many students reading this will probably hotly contest that point, but we want to challenge you with this question:
“How are we in our junior/senior year of college any more skilled/ experienced at reading comprehension than we were in high school?”
The answer is probably not much. Most college based exams and courses, especially for pre-med students, don't focus on simple passage based reading comprehension skills. Our passage reading skills are probably the same skills we developed during our initial attempts at standardized tests and we carry these habits over to MCAT.
Naturally intelligent individuals also carry over their old habits but they were probably “better” suited for standardized testing in the first place and therefore their CARS performance is leagues ahead of an average student from the start with ZERO experience. (This is why "naturally intelligent" students don't practice test taking strategy)
While it might seem hopeless, we have seen hundreds of average students drastically improve their ability to fight the CARS section. It just takes a fundamentals based approach that addresses the common inadequacies that most CARS courses fail to cover.
That's the entire hope of the MCATSavior CARS course. To provide average students with a rational, educationally proven way to compete with “naturally intelligent” students in CARS. If this material interests you feel free to keep on reading or check out any one of our free strategy courses in order to see how you could do the same.
