MCAT Critical Analysis & Reasoning Skills
Every correct answer on this section can be proved. Most students were never shown the line — so they practise more, plateau, and conclude the section is measuring something about them that cannot be changed. It isn’t.
Fifteen minutes, no charge. San Diego, or by video anywhere.
The plateau
You read the question properly. You narrowed it to two answers. One felt slightly better, you took it, and you were wrong — and when you read the explanation afterwards it made sense but did not help, because you could not find the moment where you should have done something differently.
So you did what has worked every other time in your academic life. You did more of it. More passages, more hours. The score moved about a point.
That is a strategy problem answered with a volume solution.
Two hundred passages are not wasted — they are unread. Each one generated information about how your mind goes wrong on this section, and that information was discarded ninety seconds after the score appeared. Movement on CARS comes from eliminating specific, repeated, nameable errors. Not from reading faster.
The method
The people writing this section work under constraints. A fixed distribution of question types on every form. Passages adapted from work somebody else wrote. No outside knowledge, ever. And every wrong answer has to be wrong for a reason they could defend in a room. A writer who could do anything would be unpredictable. A writer under those four constraints has very few moves.
Name the leap. It must be true, not could be true.
Every inference question in existence is one question wearing different clothes: what am I leaping from, and what are they asking me to leap to?
Passage language is a warning. Synonyms are the tell.
Correct answers restate the passage in different words — they have to, or the question would measure string-matching instead of reasoning. Recognition is not evidence. It is the bait.
Get it wrong in ten seconds or right in ninety. Never wrong slowly.
Two or three questions a section are not designed to be answered. Missing one costs a point. Missing one slowly costs the passage you no longer have time for.
Not understanding an answer is grounds for keeping it. Never for cutting it.
The choices you cannot immediately follow are disproportionately the correct ones. Students eliminate them for precisely the reason they should be kept.
PORTRAIT
Replace this box with a photograph.
Four-by-five, natural light, no suit.
Michael Egenthal, Esq. · San Diego
Who is teaching this
Every CARS passage is somebody making a case. I have spent a career taking arguments apart: how they are built, what a single word is doing, where a conclusion has outrun the thing supporting it. That is the section, described.
I started teaching this exam in 2004, when it was called Verbal Reasoning — sixty minutes, seven passages, scored one to fifteen. In 2015 the AAMC retired it and replaced it with CARS. When the exam changed I rebuilt the method rather than renaming it, which is why I can tell you exactly what carried over and what quietly stopped working. A good deal of the advice still circulating never got that treatment.
Placeholder for a student quote on the current scale. — Initials, test year
Coaching
I take a small number of students at a time, so there is not always a slot open.
$435per session · one hour forty minutes
The session is long on purpose. An hour is enough to work passages and not enough to work out why you missed what you missed — and the second half is where the score is.
Most of what I teach will be in the book, and the book will be cheaper. What one-to-one adds is a second pair of eyes on your own error patterns, which is the part almost nobody can do honestly about themselves. Students work through a run of sessions, arranged as we go.
Start with a call. Fifteen minutes, no charge, no pitch. I want to know where you are starting and when you are testing — and you should want to know whether you can work with me before you spend anything.
Book a free intro call →The book
Twelve Rules for MCAT® CARS
The full method. The twelve rules with their proofs, worked examples taken start to finish, original passages, and the charting system that turns your own wrong answers into the only study document ever written specifically about you.
Tell me where to send it and I will let you know when it is ready. Nothing else, and no more than a few emails a year.