Verbal Reasoning

[Guest ashna]

For any of you who have done well on the verbal section, do you have any advice? Also, for those that have written both the April 2002 exam (with the new reduced # of verbal questions) and the old format of the MCAT, did you find that the verbal reasoning was easier to complete on the new MCAT?

[Guest Lactic Folly]

Make sure to go over your mistakes when you write practice tests.. here are some previous threads.

pub125.ezboard.com/fpreme...D=62.topic

 

pub125.ezboard.com/fpreme...=112.topic

[Guest westcoastgrrl]

I did well last year (13-15) and the best advice I can give is to do as many practice tests as you can. I first did a few (Kaplan, Gold Standard) without timing myself, to see if I would do OK on content, and then later I did a whole bunch of timed tests, to get the feel of the pacing. Be strict with yourself about the timing while you are practicing and you'll feel WAY more confident on test day. And if you notice you are falling behind, stay calm and re-organize yourself eg. finish the passage you are on and then prioritize the remaining passages that have the most questions. Good luck.

[Guest adlinner]

The main piece of advice is to practice reading!

 

It's not as easy as it sounds. The verbal reasoning section requires you to take a large amount of concisely written material, pay attention to it all for a length of time much longer than the average attention span, understand it quickly, synthesize it and apply it to new situations. Unlike the basic sciences, there is very little you can memorize but rather you will use skills that you have developed over a period of time. Try to push yourself all the time to get used to reading fast without losing comprehension.

 

 

 

The second piece of advice is to understand a wide breadth of subjects.

 

I remembered my MCAT had sections on Yeats' view on the war poets, social psych experimental design, ecology, early Christianity, utilitarian ethics, etc. The sections I found easy were on topics I knew quite abit about already. For example, I knew the issues surrounding the Yeats passage because I've taken the relevant English courses in university. Or I had read a similar study in my introductory psych class and I already had a schema in my head of what types of information to expect BEFORE it was presented in the passage - ie once I read that the passage was about experimental design and results, I immediately expected that I'd later read about what the control was and its result. My lack of knowledge about ecology hurt me a little bit as I had to memorize or infer the meaning of terms used in the passage rather than know them beforehand. So I guess as you do your practice tests and come across topics you know very little about it might help reading up on it at a later date.

 

 

 

What's the best way to go about doing these two things?

 

Read good books/magazines! Find material that is written for an audience with a high educational background and in subjects you might not know anything about. The Economist (http://www.economist.com) is my favourite and you'll be able to practice for any political and economic passages - besides getting exposed to some of the world's best journalism (which may be useful down the road).

 

Go to your library and pull random journal articles from the shelves and read them for immediate understanding - these can be from the humanities, the ecological sciences, the social sciences or the physical/biological sciences. This is a novel piece of advice and it'll help you in all the sections. Because that's what all four sections of the MCAT really tests: can you be shown new information and then use what you already know to make sense of it in a short amount of time?

 

(Sure, sample MCAT questions might show you the same thing but be more representative of what you'll see and with questions to boot, but I think supplementing your practice with real articles - instead of the watered down versions of the real articles on the MCAT - forces you to work at a level beyond what's expected of you.)

 

 

Good luck!