Education Questions and Answers
What is the best book to prepare for the verbal section of MCAT?
Question:Hi,
I want to prepare for the MCAT. I took a practice test and my verbal was very low. I always face problems with that kind of questions. What is the best book to improve your MCAT score? What advice, techniques or tricks do you have that will help me? I always wanted to go to medical school but was unable because of family problems. It is really important to me because I feel this is my last chance being a nontraditional student. If I dont make it now...I will not apply later..but I will feel sorry for the rest of my life...help me please...
Answers:
There is never one "best" book for standardized testing because each person has resources that worked well and not so well for them.
However, I would advise trying either a Princeton Review or Kaplan course or trying one of their books. Ultimately though, doing a lot of questions in the verbal section will probably help you the most.
First off, you should just practice doing questions to get them right because you have to first learn what the questions are trying to ask and what parts of the passage are relevant. Once you feel more comfortable with the questions and passages themselves, you should do blocks of questions and passages against time. Try always answering the easiest questions first and saving the harder questions for later so that the harder questions do eat up time.
But like I said before, the most important thing to remember is, the more you do practice questions, the better you will get at them.
In your situation I would seriously consider hiring a private coach to help you pass this test. It's going to be expensive but at this point I don't think you want to take any chances. Maybe go to the local Kaplan place and see if they can point you to a private tutor who will hopefully also be able to recommend study materials.
I found the Princeton Review MCAT study book to be very helpful. Kaplan also has a helpful review book. The books are a bit pricey, but if you want to do well, they are almost necessary. Another thing that you can do, is organize a study group and each time you get together, focus on one part of the exam. Studying with others may help you understand things that maybe you didn't understand before because more than likely someone in your study group will be able to help you with the parts that you didn't do so well in! Good luck!
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