2 Bad Habits Keeping Your CARS Score Low

Show Notes

Has any of this ever happened to you when preparing for the MCAT?: - You UNDERSTAND the passage but get the questions wrong (and when you review the passage, the answer was so obvious!) - You're afraid to choose an answer because it seems too easy (so you don't choose it, but it was the right one!) - You constantly get stuck between two answer choices (and end up choosing the wrong one because you second guess yourself!) Don't worry. We’ve all been there! It took a lot of disappointing scores before we figured out what was really going on, and what the real culprits to our low scores were… We'll let Ryan (130 CARS scorer) explain them to you in this episode, so that you can be one step closer to conquering MCAT CARS!

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Hey there! This is Monica, just here to let you guys know that we release a lot of our YouTube clips like this one on our podcast for those of you who prefer listening over watching a video. If you want to watch the full video, head on over to our YouTube channel, so the link to that is in the show notes for you guys. In this episode, Ryan covers the two most common bad habits that students develop when preparing for cars, and how you can identify and avoid these to make sure that you're on track to increasing your score. Enjoy! Many of our students over the years have told us something along the lines of, I know that I'm good at cars when looking back at it, but it's so hard for me the first time around, and I get that struggle. It's like every time you review it, the right answer is right in front of you. After reading the answers during the review, it just makes sense, but you didn't pick the right one the first time around, and that's extremely frustrating. You could even think back all the way back to the point where you were taking the test for the first time, and now that you know what answer is right, you realize where you didn't get it, or something you didn't pick up, or a piece of evidence you dropped, and now it's just so obvious, and that can be frustrating for you as well. It's even more disappointing when you found that you narrowed it down to two answers, including the right one, and you second-guessed yourself and went the wrong way. We've all been there, and it's taking a bunch of time and a bunch of disappointing car scores for us to realize what's really going on. It leads down to two mental habits that a lot of pre-meds suffer from that will dramatically impact your car score in a negative way, and both of them, coincidentally, go hand in hand. The first bad mental habit is overthinking, and specifically overthinking questions. Here are some signs that you might be overthinking. You read the entire passage and understand it well, but you get the questions wrong. You stray away from an answer choice because it feels too easy, or you constantly get stuck between two answer choices. The AAMC wants to know one thing. That is, can you apply your understanding of this passage to the question? Now, this requires intuitive skill. Most students we've realized can read this passage, and will know the answer when they go into the question and read the answer choices, but this is where the overthinking comes into play. Those same students who had it right to begin with often start over-rationalizing why the wrong answer should be the one we choose, and we start to talk ourselves out of what is the right answer. The moment that you dismiss the correct answer, or the one that you thought intuitively sounded good, then your mind automatically goes, okay, out of the next three, the three inferior answers, which of these is the next best correct sounding answer? And you start to come up with a rationale for why those might be better than the one you had in mind to begin with. If you find yourself trying to come up with this big, complicated rationale to justify an answer, let that be a red flag that you might be overthinking. Take a second, step back, breathe, and let's figure out if there is another answer that you might have been inclined to pick, and that you might have dismissed early on. Cultivate Awareness. Now, we say this often. When you are aware, you will notice yourself making these mistakes. Awareness comes from being present as much as possible. Now, meditation and mindfulness techniques can help you apply awareness to your daily life. Now, with awareness comes calm and confidence as well. And confidence is a key factor needed and doing well on cars. You need to be able to be confident and trust your instinct when you pick the right answer and be able to go with it without any hesitation or overthinking. Now, that's how you tackle overthinking in our opinion. But there is a second mental habit that plays a lot of car scores. And unfortunately, it's the exact thing that cars is testing you on. And that is decision making. Most of us aren't very good at decision making to start with, myself included. How many hours have you spent scrolling through the countless but somehow not enough number of Netflix options to watch, but still find yourself to continue scrolling? And then how many of you recognize that you're wasting time but still continue to keep scrolling? Here also, this is us as well. Most of us can't deal with these choices to begin with. But then when you add in a time constraint, then when you add in not feeling like you have enough information, then you add in the fact that our choices on this exam can impact the rest of our life. These become near paralyzing. How can we do this if we can't pick a Netflix show? No wonder so many pre-meds feel such anxiety when going through this process. But the funny thing is, this is exactly what the AAMC wants. They want a student that can find a way to power through this. The MCAT was designed to test your future doctor skills. And we like to think that not only do they prepare you to be a good doctor, but they also train you while testing for the MCAT. It's training you to be a good physician as well. Here's how this might apply. Let's fast forward to your future life. And a patient presents to you needing urgent attention. Now we don't have the luxury of time to go look up everything we might need to know in every medication and every procedure, but we still need to be confident about our decision. We don't have time to overthink. So this is the game that they're teaching us to play. We don't have time to look up everything we need. And we can't be 100% sure, but we need to be confident about our decision nonetheless. That is the key, the feeling of being 100% sure that you are correct. And even in cars, we can't be 100% sure. If we have the luxury of sitting and taking our time and pouring over the evidence until we are 100% sure about every answer, we will feel the consequence of the time constraint. When it comes to cars, we need to be okay with uncertainty. We need to be okay with an answer that sounds good enough. We don't have time and we don't have that luxury to go fine and be 100% confident about an answer. If a question or an answer choice sounds good enough, then we need to be confident enough to go with it. Don't try to get a full understanding of the passage. For the most part, these passages are boring. And you will use a lot more mental energy than you need if you try to get a full understanding of every passage, regardless of what it's about. Get a good enough understanding so you can find an answer that is good enough for you to go on. Cars is about quick, confident decision making. This is going to be a skill required of you as a physician anyway, so we might as well learn it now. When we're able to cut out our time and be confident about our decision making, we know that this improves car scores dramatically. And just like that in our car strategy course, we will be showing you a lot more mental hacks that can help you improve your car's performance and in doing so your car score overall. We'll also show you proven passage reading strategies, question decryption techniques, answer elimination methods and much, much more. At the end of this course and at the end of your time with us, our hope is that you can begin to see cars in the MCAT in a new light as a means of practicing the skills necessary to become a physician. Because when you shift this perspective and you begin to see it in a new light, to see cars in a new light, you can see that they're not just boring useless passages, right? There are means to get you from point A all the way to your doctor dream. So let's do this. If you've not registered for our car strategy course already, you can do so using the link below. We will help you demystify this section and show you that it is much easier to master than it may seem at first. You have made it this far and this is no small feat, but we want to make sure that cars is not the reason that your MCAT score is unbalanced and that medical schools don't want to interview you. And I look forward to helping you increase your car score. Hey everyone, this is Monica again. And before you go, I just want to remind you that if you're not receiving our daily free MCAT strategy and success story emails yet, definitely be sure to sign up for those at MCATMastery.net slash free course. In addition to that, if you feel like you might need personalized help with the exam and would like to have an MCAT mentor, look at your situation and help you identify exactly what's holding your score back. You can look into that too at MCATMastery.net slash mentors. And lastly, and most importantly, we just want you guys to know that you have what it takes to succeed on this exam. We know the MCAT is intimidating. And when you get a score that's lower than you expected on a practice or on the real thing, it's so easy to feel discouraged or frustrated or even hopeless about the exam. We get it. A lot of us have been there. So we want to give you the guidance that we wish we'd had when we were in your shoes. And that's what these interviews are for. That's what our emails are for. We want you guys to be able to feel confident again and most importantly be able to see that med school mission is possible and it's not out of your reach at all. So thanks again for listening and remember that every top score every med student and every doctor made it through this journey. So you can do it too. You got this.