I've been struggling with the verbal section on my practice exams... on the AAMC exams I've scored in the range of 8-10 whereas on Kaplan I've struggled to get past a 9 and range anywhere from 6-9... is Kaplan considerably more difficult than the actual exam and more importantly is the verbal section of the AAMC exams we get more representative of the real exam? On that note... how do the physical sciences and biological sciences sections on Kaplan and the AAMC we're given compare to the actual exams? On my most recent Kaplan exam I scored a -- which makes me wonder even more.
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Ah, Verbal Reasoning. A few notes on it:
-It tends to be the lowest score for people taking the MCAT. If you look at average MCAT scores overall and in med school admissions, it is consistently a point or two behind physical and biological sciences on average.
-It is the slowest section to improve. This is because it's not the way the vast majority of pre-med students are used to being tested. The verbal section is almost LSAT-like in the way you have to think -- interpret data, understand assumptions, find faults in people's arguments, understand how a new piece of evidence may fit into or dissuade the reader from agreeing with the author's argument. Practice verbal! A lot! I recommend students do at least two verbal passages every single day. Some days, do whole sections. And take serious time to really look back over your work. Review your answers. Use post-phrasing (I'll send out an email explaining this in case you haven't heard about it yet) to check your answers before reading Kaplan's explanations. Make "Why-I-Missed-It" tables (to be described again in Verbal III on Monday). But whatever you do, don't get trapped into thinking that just because you know how to study for the sciences (content and practice, and you tend to know how to improve) and may not know what to do for verbal (practice, review, make sure you really understand what to do with each question type -- again, to be discussed in Verbal III) that you shouldn't bother studying for verbal. If anything, it's bigger motivation to do so.
Now for the comparison.
The questions and passages are really not made more difficult in Kaplan or AAMC than the actual MCAT. The distribution is roughly similar -- 2 "easier" passages per section, 2-3 "medium" and 2-3 "hard"; the hard ones tend to be very detailed natural sciences passages, public policy, or philosophy -- we'll talk about why at MSCT III. There also tend to be 2-3 passages each in natural sciences, social sciences and humanities. Each type of passage tends to have the same types of questions (lots of inference and assumption in humanities, lots of evaluation and incorporation in social sciences, lots of detail and application in natural sciences). One key difference though, as mentioned in the previous blog post, is that the variety of passages in Kaplan may be wider, and AAMC may have multiple passages on a full-length in the same topic. On Test Day, it will tend to be more like Kaplan.
As for scoring, remember that one question can correspond to an increase or decrease in a point. So, it's not really significant yet if your AAMC scores tend to be a point or two higher than Kaplan. Our goal, though, is to get you at least into double-digits consistently on both types of tests, and hopefully into the 12+ range (optimal for "Top 20" schools, but not an absolute requirement). How to do this? We'll talk about it at Verbal III, MSCT III, and in my re-cap emails for both of those lessons.
I hope this helps!
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