I think there is nothing more annoying in preparing for the MCAT than the verbal section. It's difficult for some people (if not most), since it's not too clear on how to prepare for it and there's not one sure-fire way.
In my opinion, the verbal section is graded pretty steeply, without much room for error in comparison to the other sections. I find the BS section to be the section that is the least steeply graded (which doesn't make too much sense as I and many others probably expect this section to be the strongest for pre-meds).
What I did to prepare for the verbal section was try ExamKracker's 101 verbal passages and some practice verbal in Kaplan's books. I liked EK's book since tons of passages are in one book and you can check your answers in the back as well as the reason why they're correct, while I think Kaplan's were a little less challenging. Whatever book you use is up to you, now I'll try to focus a little more on techniques.
1. Reading comprehension is key. Reading comprehension is a blanket term, but on the MCAT it is key to get the main idea of a passage. Having a good grasp of the main idea can help you with questions that ask you the tone of the author, who the author might be (a scientist, a lawyer, a historian, etc), as well as give you a little more insight on questions that are a little more detailed.
So how do you get better at reading comprehension? Every pre-med has some basic reading comprehension skills, but a way to speed up improvement is to write a little 1-sentence summary of a paragraph you read, or just a few words summarizing a paragraph while capturing the main idea of it.
2. The tie-in to the previous section is "mapping" a passage, where you take each paragraph and write a few words to one sentence, in order to quickly answer a question about a particular paragraph, and to add all of your piecemeal "mini-maps" for each paragraph in order to get a good grasp of the main idea.
Among the types of questions you might get asked are to properly identify the author's tone, what the main idea of the passage is, and what is said in a certain paragraph. Additionally, you might be asked to interpret what a phrase means, and that's pretty common on the verbal section.
Some people might recommend reading newspapers or magazines in order to improve reading comprehension, but I don't really recommend that as it's more of a time-sink and you should have questions available to answer regarding the passage in MCAT-style. This section is a lot of practice and training and a little more materials-heavy to get the best result in my opinion.
I hope that's some help, if you have any questions don't hesitate to leave a comment. cheers
No comments:
Post a Comment