gilly11 Posted July 1, 2011 Report Share Posted July 1, 2011 I have been using Ek and TPR and I am consistently getting 7 - 8. I have been practicing for 1 month now but still no improvement. This is so frustrating . My real mcat is on sept 10th. Any advice? I am dying to see 9 -11. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
vitals Posted July 13, 2011 Report Share Posted July 13, 2011 may help to review where your mistakes are. some tricks i found helpful: - review the answers given, cross off those that wrong to narrow down the choices (at least increasing your chances of guessing the correct answer) - choose that answer that resonates with the theme - rephrase the question....most of them end up asking along the lines "the author agrees/believes..." - the topic sentence of the paragraph is usually at the beginning of the paragraph, examples in the middle and conclusion of the paragraph at the end - pay attention to words such as 'on the contrary', 'however'....this introduces a opposing view i am writing AUG 19. the pressure is on!! hope this helps!! best of luck Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
medhopeful64 Posted July 13, 2011 Report Share Posted July 13, 2011 are you tracking your scores? make note of the types of errors you make so that you can give yourself a little nudge when you come across one of your common pitfalls on the next exam. Ie, do you struggle with questions that involve the author's tone? main idea? or fall for specific types of distractors? For me, I sometimes get tripped over double negative questions (which does the author NOT clearly support?). Make a chart and keep track of the types of mistakes you make Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
zxcv Posted July 13, 2011 Report Share Posted July 13, 2011 I have been using Ek and TPR and I am consistently getting 7 - 8. I have been practicing for 1 month now but still no improvement. This is so frustrating . My real mcat is on sept 10th. Any advice? I am dying to see 9 -11. Dude/ette, you have 2 months left. You need to keep on practice. One of the things I believe about reading (and there is research on this), that it is skills and not a skill; most premeds do extremley well on a passage about astronomy but tank a passage about moral relativisim. As you do more passages, you will come across those "different" passages and will start to pick them up. I know VR can be especially frustrating, given the variability associated with. However, success on it, like most things in life, is contingent upon being persistet. I would argue that the entire MCAT tests nothing but persistence. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
I.Want.In Posted July 13, 2011 Report Share Posted July 13, 2011 Dude/ette, you have 2 months left. You need to keep on practice. One of the things I believe about reading (and there is research on this), that it is a skills and not a skill. Hence, most premeds do extremley well on a passage about astronomy but tank a passage about moral relativisim. As you do more passages, you will come across those "different" passages and will start to pick them up. I know VR can be especially frustrating, given the variability associated with. However, success on it, like most things in life, is contingent upon being persistet. I would argue that the entire MCAT tests nothing but persistence. Respect, couldn't have said it any better myself (would have probably said so way worse actually ) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
North12 Posted July 15, 2011 Report Share Posted July 15, 2011 Check out StudentDoctorNetwork - the Americans have huge threads of tips. This one really helped me break into the double digits (only to a 10, but Im optimistic!) http://forums.studentdoctor.net/showthread.php?t=509702 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ameltingbanana Posted July 15, 2011 Report Share Posted July 15, 2011 Hey North12, thanks for the guide, that is a really nice summary of good VR strategies. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tijuana Posted July 15, 2011 Report Share Posted July 15, 2011 yea I agree with everything above. i'll share my training strategy as well, i'll find out if it works in 3 weeks, but so far, I'm alot more confident than I was two months ago. VR practice as like practicing for other sports for me, much like weight lifting, I had a pretty strict training schedule. Active reading was the method that I used to do VR, I did some review on those skills and applied them as I went along. I started out doing two passages per day, untimed, and took as long as I wanted. consistency was the key and getting into the habit of spending 30mins/day to practice, nothing more or less; went back figured out my mistakes and do it all over again the next day. Then I started to be more conscious about my time, noticing the amount of time it takes to read the whole passage. As I got more comfortable, I set out time limits/passage. then I did 3 passages, untimed, to gain more reading stamina, untimed, then timed when I got more comfortable; eventually, I figured out a good pace for me to do 4 passages, timed, per day (set aside 30-40mins) Again, the key is persistence. I had a few days where I didn't do too hot (my thinking "muscles" was too burnt out), completely bombed a passage. but try not to let it affect you so much and pick up where you left off and do it all over again. Give yourself an "off-day", training 6 out of 7 days/week. On off-days, pick up a random scholar article and do some active reading. When you're more confident on your skill, start doing a full length test (once/week) to measure your performance. Hopefully this will pay off. Take my training strategies with a grain of salt. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Archived
This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.