I’m not very familiar with EK’s method, so I’m not going to comment about it. But I can tell you that the biggest mistakes that Kaplan students make when trying to map passages is that they write too much, and they focus on the wrong things. Lorelei and Nutmeg have written some excellent posts about how important it is to focus on the author’s purpose, argument, and thought process, and not on the details s/he uses to support that argument. Your map should be an outline of the purpose of each paragraph, not the details (in other words, not just a paraphrase). Also, it is absolutely essential that you write very little. Be as lazy as possible. Abbreviate as much as you can, leave out articles (a, an, the), and take other shortcuts to minimize the amount of writing you can do while still making your notes readable. If you are writing whole sentences, you are writing way too much. Save that for the essay section. Finally, you should be predicting your answers before you look at the answer choices. If you’re not, start doing this, as it helps to force you to think about the important parts of the passage and avoid choosing answers that are outside the author’s scope and purpose.

It is definitely harder to raise your VR score compared to the science sections, but it IS possible with enough practice and effort. Unfortunately, there isn’t any suggestion I can give to you that will automatically make it easy. Try to keep a positive attitude, and keep practicing your critical reading and answer prediction skills for a few minutes every day between now and the test. A very large portion of success in this whole process of becoming a physician comes from simply refusing to give up

I think a lot of what this test looks for is the ability to separate fact and opinion. That’s why you get questions like "does it strengthen or weaken this statement to say…?" and so forth. So when evaluating each assertion, you need to look past the facts, which contribute to the summary, but are not the point of the passage. It is the conclusions derived from those facts–which are opinions that the author seeks to support by the facts–that are the main idea.

View all authors as attempting not to inform you, but to pursuade you. What conclusion are they trying to make you draw from the data? Are there any conceivable ways in which the data might be construed to mean something else? Even if you know nothing about the subject, can you imagine a person disagreeing with the conclusions?

When they ask you "what’s the main idea?" the answer is not likely to be the pure informational themes that they give, like "many painters in the 18th century worked with one another." That’s just informational–it sounds like that’s just a trend demonstrated by the anecdotal evidence that might be presented. More interesting as an idea is that, say, they were not appreciated in their time, or that European painters were more appreciated in the US than at home, or so forth. There’s a subjective quality to these sorts of assertions, and to back this up, one would likely give a series of anecdotes. Don’t just try to identify what the anecdotal information has in common; try to seek why it is relevant. Try to find the assertion which would be constroversial or unexpected if the anecdotes weren’t there.

Apart from that, there are situations with those sorts of questions where every answer choice is an opinion. In these instances, you want to be sure that you find something that applies to every (or almost every) paragraph, rather than applying to only one paragraph. If the selection applies to only one example given, it is not the theme.

The final pitfall is the qualifiers seen at the beginning of the article. Sometimes you have a choice which refers to a statement made in the opening paragraph that is not the thesis itself. Generally, such a claim, made at the outset, is made to justify the course of reasoning that will proceed. It is common for people that are seeking to pursuade that they first try to justify why you should read the article, or to dispel a common conception that impedes their ability to teach you something new. These statements are not theses.

*In short, look for the theme/thesis/main idea as an *opinion* that acts as a recurrent theme throughout, and that the supporting evidence would act to support in all or most all instances.*

Something I’ve done on occasion to figure out the author’s point of view is to find the place where s/he is talking about the relevant point, and look for any non-necessary words: words that don’t absolutely have to be there to convey the facts, as well as words that could have been chosen differently to give a different impression. See what would be lost by stripping the prose down to the bare minimum, and that usually gives you an idea of the author’s viewpoint.

Unfortunately I haven’t had enough time to find good public-domain examples, but here is one from a blog I’m currently reading that might give you the idea. (Copied from http://www.corante.com/loom/archives…ng_hobbits.php)

Skeptics find this possibility implausible, arguing that it’s more likely this individual was just a pygmy human with some genetic defect. As far as I can tell, this skepticism about shrinking hominid brains flows from two sources.

The other source of skepticism, which I mentioned in my last post, is a vague sense that when it comes to hominid brains, evolution cannot run in reverse. It’s certainly true that if you draw a graph of hominid brain size over time, it has climbed to spectacular heights…

In the first paragraph, take "skeptics" - that’s a loaded word. Does he consider himself a skeptic? Probably not. Saying "as far as I can tell" implies that he doesn’t really understand the skeptics’ viewpoint, so presumably he doesn’t share it. ("implausible" and "just" are two other words you might take notice of.)

Second paragraph, "vague" also implies that he doesn’t share that sense - respectable scientific hypotheses shouldn’t be vague. Then in the next sentence, the use of "certainly" in this case is implying that a "BUT" is coming up soon (it’s the next paragraph, in fact) - like saying "well, I’ll give you that, BUT that’s the only part you have right."

This is obviously not an ideal passage for this use, because Zimmer isn’t at all trying to hide his viewpoint, but it might give you an idea of the kind of thing to look for.

Nutmeg has good advice about understanding WHY details are there, not understanding every little bit.

As far as recognizing what is skippable, there are some typical structures that give you that hint. For example: "Sandra Day O’Connor was a paragon, an example to women everywhere, a perfect choice as the first female justice." (I just made that up.) In that sentence, and pretty much any sentence with that structure, the three things set off by commas are all similar to each other. If you don’t know what "paragon" means, that’s OK - you know, based on the structure, that it has to be something similar to the other two. And you don’t need to read them all carefully, just remember that this is stuff about why O’Connor is awesome.

There’s a similar structure, like this: "Condoleezza Rice is a classically trained pianist, a figure skater, and a football fan." The "and" in there means that the details are NOT all the same thing, but they are three details that are somewhat related. In this case, it’s Rice’s hobbies. Still, you don’t need to memorize them or even necessarily understand them all (my examples are obvious, but there could be one with words you don’t know), just note what they’re about in general.

Also, anything with numbers is a detail. Don’t worry about memorizing or understanding them, just note where they are and what they’re about.

Another hint: repetition usually hints that there are several examples or statements about the same thing. For example, this quote from the VR example on aamc.org (http://www.aamc.org/students/mcat/vrsampleitems.pdf):

"It is important to see that we don’t just talk about
arguments in terms of war. We can actually win or
lose arguments. We see the person we are arguing
with as an opponent. We attack his positions and we
defend our own. We gain and lose ground. We plan
and use strategies."

All those sentences that start with "We" are examples of how arguments are not just TALKED ABOUT in terms of war, but really experienced and structured in terms of war (which is what the author says in words in the rest of the paragraph). This is typical. When you get a list like this, you don’t need to necessarily understand every item, but understand what the list consists of, and why it’s there.