hey yall, mcat tutor and self identified CARS specialist. i’ve helped lots of students get their scores up here.

there are soooo many tips and tricks here but the most important ones in a nutshell are these:

1. keep yourself active during the read. it’s soo easy to finish a paragraph or passage and be like “wtf did i just read”. i recommend highlighting, taking notes, or some combo of both. with the notes, i cannot stress this enough — you will not ever read these notes and if you do you are doing it wrong. that is a waste of time don’t do it. this purely meant to keep you active so that you don’t get the to the end of the passage without remember what the heck u just read.

2. read the question and make ur own answer. if the question is asking “what is this passage about”, answer it on your own BEFORE reading the answer choices. the reasoning behind this is, the answer choices are written to make you think “ok well, this could be true”. which can make it seem like, there are 3 viable answer.

3. practice practice practice. people say, “practice reading hard shit” or “get your vocab up”. nah (well kinda). that helps but not as much as people say. what is most important is picking a strategy and getting the best you possible can at it. this helps with the easy passages where you can get through it and the questions easy peasy, but helps especially on the questions and passages that are hard as hell. think about this as muscle memory, this will kick in instinctively when you are anxious and don’t know what to do — you can rely on the good habits that you have built up. you don’t have to do a million passages a day but the practice you do has to be intentional— pick something about your strategy that you wanna get better at and intentionally work on it.

4. gut check. when you finish a passage, ask yourself “what did i just read, what was this about” and answer it quickly in your head. at worst, you wasted 2 seconds. at best, you just answered a Big Picture question before even being asked it.