MCAT Verbal Made Easy

Trying to get into medical school is probably one of the toughest things to do aside from competing with Chuck Norris in a staring contest. The reason in many cases is due to the Medical College Admission Test or the MCAT. This past application cycle I ended up taking the test twice, the first time I received a 21 which is a terrible score. The average MCAT score is a 28 for students getting into medical school, yea mine was terrible. My main problem was my Verbal Section because I didn't know how to study for it. The first time around I would read each passage and go to the questions and try to answer them. The problem was that most of the time I could not remember what the passage was about so I had to keep referring back to the passage which wasted a lot of time and only added to the stress level

The second time I took the test I received a 29, an 8 point increase! Moreover, for the Verbal Section I ended up going from a 6 to a 9. The main reason was because I thought I cracked the code on how to study for the Verbal. Here is what I did to study:

Before I even looked at a practice test I read as many news editorials and columnist articles as I could in 10 minutes. I read articles from nytimes.com, bloomberg.com, and cnn.com. This helped my speed reading immensely which is extremely important for the MCAT. Plus, those types of articles are similar to the ones that you could see on the Verbal Section; opinionated and boring. This helps to prime your mind for the actual passages, too.

After reading online news articles for 10 minutes, I would take a 5 minute break and jump into a practice Verbal Section or a full length practice test. Here is where the fun begins. Instead of reading the passages, I began with reading the questions. This helps to figure out what you should pay attention to in the passage such as main ideas, opinions, and arguments. Don't spend more than 30 seconds total on the questions, though. Also, a lot of the questions ask 'what does [blank] word mean in the context of the passage?' or 'what does [long quote found in the passage] mean?' When these questions come up, I went directly to the passage and highlighted the word or quote immediately in the passage. This way, when I got to the quote or word in the passage I knew to pay attention to it.

Make sure you go back over your test! It is very important to know what you got wrong and why you got it wrong so you don't make the same mistakes again. This goes for any section of the test.

Both Kaplan and Princeton Review offer great review courses and materials to help you succeed. I took the Kaplan Review Course but I ended up using my own strategy for the Verbal Section. You can also search Google for the 'MCAT Question of the Day' which you can have emailed to you every day. There are plenty others out there but these are the most popular ones.