After working with thousands of students we discovered that the CARS teaching material available to students is 100% wrong.
At MCATSavior we know how frustrating it can be for
average students to study CARS night and day
only to get less than ideal results.
The fault lies with the companies and programs that build CARS courses to “sell” and not “teach” . So let’s explore what’s wrong with CARS instructional material and how we can fix it.
The first thing students should be aware of is that CARS is a sport. Unlike the other 3 sections the information you need to answer the questions comes exclusively from the passage; no outside knowledge is needed.
C/P, B/B, and P/S is a test of your content knowledge + passage reading
CARS is a test of your passage reading skills + reasoning skills
This is why CARS is a test of how you APPLY your skills(not your knowledge) in unfamiliar situations (like on a real exam). You can’t learn MCAT CARS the same way you learn the other three sections and unfortunately almost all the instructional material on the market doesn’t factor this difference in.
To summarize the education theory very briefly: almost every company uses a “top down” approach to teaching CARS.
Imagine being forced to play a sport you never heard of before
without being told anything but a few basic rules.
You would probably be very anxious and wouldn’t be very good at it.
That is exactly what endlessly doing tons of passages and reviewing them in CARS looks like to students. Top down teaching is effective for C/P, B/B, and P/S because once the content has been learned, passage based testing experience is the key to higher scores. CARS has a different set of rules.
To teach CARS effectively, MCATSavior uses a “Bottom Up Approach” which focuses on learning fundamental skills which form the basis for our Four Foundations of CARS Growth. After building a solid foundation we gradually bring the student up to full testing capability step by step.
So why don’t all companies do this?
Simple. BECAUSE IT DOESN’T SELL!!
There is a reason why MCATSavior is a Social Business. Bottom up learning methods are super easy to learn and very effective for students but they don’t generate sales of supporting products.
Remember all the third party companies selling you CARS material are COMPANIES that want to make money. Not all of them are social businesses with a mission to give away as many free strategy courses as possible to students.(we won’t lie we like money too, just not enough to make trashy MCAT courses and trick students into buying them with the promise of going from 508 to 521 in 3 weeks)
Top down learning is ineffective for CARS BUT it helps perpetuate the myth that high volume CARS practice=future improvement. To get high volume practice you need a lot of CARS passages. To get a lot of CARS passages you need to buy them from the company.
Funny how that works huh?
This is how students get caught in an endless cycle of practice/review with no significant improvement but they push through because “hey it worked for this (insert name of >90th percentile MCAT score person) why won’t it work for me”.
(spoiler alert: that person was probably just naturally intelligent. They could have farmed coconuts in Morocco instead of doing those CARS passages and still outscored us average students)
Even students who do well on practice can show up to test day and get bombarded with AAMC’s new hybrid style passages or their unfair “gambling” style 50/50 questions which make the exam much more difficult And even if you make it through all of those issues, the AAMC is always deflating students scores so it can feel like you did much worse than what you are really capable of.
Under these conditions it can feel like CARS is impossible to study/train for but we don’t believe that is true. We have helped hundreds of students maximize their chances of improving their CARS scores and all it takes is a learning approach that's dedicated to doing what's best for the student instead of the company's bottom line.
If you are interested in the learning theory behind our CARS Course and why we believe CARS IS possible to study for, definitely check out Module 0 of the CARS course which is completely available for free.
If you want more guidance feel free to check out all our other materials like our free strategy courses here for some great test taking tips/tricks. Hopefully they help give you the edge you need on test day!
