MCAT Question of the Day: MCAT Verbal Mini Course--How do I prepare for the MCAT CARS Test?

When you’re working on MCAT Prep keep three things in mind: what exactly the CARS section is testing, what you need to know to excel, and what free materials are available to you. The CARS section is testing your ability to analyze texts.To do this you have to understand what the format of different kinds of essays are, how they are structured and how to pick out the main idea and key ideas. You also have to understand grammar, what those main idea and key idea sentences are actually telling you. Once you can pick out the main and key ideas, and actually understand them, the next skill you need to master is the use of reflective intelligence. What is reflective intelligence? It’s the ability to not only understand what a sentence says, but also the ability to stop and reflect, to think about what a sentence means. Why is it significant? What is its relationship to the main idea? What does it imply or suggest? It’s very different from just absorbing information and spitting it back out. It’s about reflecting on relationships and what those relationships imply. As you go through a text, the first task is to determine what the subject of the essay is. This, combined with rhetoric, will allow you pick out the main idea and then pick out the key ideas that relate to it. As you watch this video, pay special attention to the method of analysis. To learn more about this section of the MCAT Test, we invite you to attend one of our free classes (http://www.cambridgelearningcenter.org/youtube-mcat-verbal) or take a look at the other free resources that we have on our web page (http://www.cambridgelearningcenter.org/free-resources) or see how you’re doing by taking a free diagnostic test (http://www.cambridgelearningcenter.org/free-diagnostic-assessment/)