General Advice for Improving VR Scores - MCAT
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
