MCATSavior The Home of FREE MCAT Strategy Courses

You can read a bit about why CARS is thought to be impossible to study for or how bottom up learning can really change your CARS approach but the key driver behind those lessons is the fact that MCAT CARS is a “sport”.

Unlike the other sections of the MCAT, CARS requires no outside knowledge. In C/P and B/B if you have never studied biochemistry you probably won’t get many of those questions correct. But a student can take a CARS section for the first time in their life and score quite well. (especially those with natural talents). 

C/P, B/B and P/S are an application of

 KNOWLEDGE 

in a passage based setting

But:

 CARS is an application of

SKILLS

in a passage based setting

This is a key distinction to make because too often we train CARS the same way we train for the other sections. High volume practice is great for growth in the other sections but is largely ineffective in CARS. If you take a look at our four step foundation for CARS growth it becomes clear why that’s the case. 

In a typical sport newbies are trained on the basics, then moved to more advanced skills, and then eventually practice games, real games, championships etc. In every game  the location, players, opposing team, equipment, and even a few rules can all change but they are forced to adapt to the situation and use the SKILLS that they built to succeed. 

Their skills become a permanent foundation of their capability as an athlete and allow them to further grow their capabilities. But what about us?

As average students we struggle so much with CARS and when we look at the way we have been trained it's no wonder we lack basic skills.

Have we ever?

      

Been taught how the AAMC builds passages?

Learned a concrete method for answering questions

 in a systematic manner instead of just using our gut?

Built tools to effectively use time in CARS instead of just

pushing ourselves to read faster and faster? 

For most of the thousands of students we have worked with, the answer is a resounding NO. 

Imagine you never learnt any basic skills and just “kinda” knew what was going on in some mystery sport. You do ok in practice but then you are forced into a championship match with a top 10 team. Your results in the championship game will drastically differ from how you did previously because you lack the skills to fight a truly strong opposing team.

This is how most students are trained for CARS: we are given barely any basics, forced to do endless CARS passages which have constantly fluctuating results, then we simply do FL tests and pray that our performance is consistent on test day.

But without the basic skills that form the foundation of our capability in CARS, we are never able to grow our skills and get caught in an endless loop of doing passages and reviewing them with no improvement.  

Lack of fundamental skills training is a massive contributor to students getting official CARS scores that are drastically lower than what the practices would suggest and it's infuriating for hardworking average students who train night and day to excel in CARS.

Here at MCATSavior we have seen the same story play out thousands of times and we decided to do something about it. If you would like to check out the learning theory behind our CARS course and how we focus on skills work for student growth, the entire module 0 of the CARS course is completely  free. 

To make sure students have the tools they need to properly learn skills for this exam we  have tons of other free strategy courses as well. Feel free to check them out and we hope they help you get an edge on test day!