mcatcars.comThe definitive MCAT CARS approach

Twenty-two years · one section

MCAT CARS:
Reverse-engineered.

We know how they think, and we know how they think you think.

Generic CARS prep is over.

The people who write your exam work under real constraints. They cut their passages out of essays they did not commission. They are not permitted to test anything you could have studied. And the standard they write to instructs them to build their wrong answers out of the mistakes students actually make, which is why the decoy on the question you just missed felt so reasonable. That is not much room, and it is not much mystery either. What is left is a machine with a finite number of moving parts, and this is twenty-two years of taking it apart.

Take the free diagnostic → The book →

Twelve questions, about fifteen minutes. It ends by naming the specific error costing you points.

The read, markedBlue and yellow are the two highlighters the real exam gives you. The numbered Lines are the method’s twelve rules, and four of them fire in these two sentences.

Advocates of participation grades argue that they reward the students who engage with a class, not only the ones who test well.

Critics reply that although the intention is fair, what a grader can actually see is who talks, so the policy rewards the confident student and quietly penalizes the thoughtful one.

Line 3 · attributionNot the author. Somebody else’s claim, and the questions will ask whose.
Line 3 · second voiceTwo perspectives now live on the page. Answer from the wrong one and you lose the point.
Line 5 · the concessionWhat the critics give away. Left of the comma is agreed by both sides.
Line 5 · the real pointRight of the comma is what they actually want to land. The line goes under it, because this sentence answers most of the set.
22years teaching CARS and the section it replaced
2004started eleven years before CARS existed, and rebuilt the method when it did
12rules. Not tips or tendencies. Rules you can check an answer against

The plateau

You got it down to two.

The most common message I get, almost word for word, several times a week.

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 generate two hundred pieces of information about how your mind goes wrong on this section. Almost all of it is discarded within ninety seconds of the score appearing.

Those passages are not wasted. They are unread. Movement on CARS comes from eliminating specific, repeated, nameable errors. Not from reading faster.

And the explanation was never going to find that moment for you. It reviews the answer, and the answer is only where the mistake ended up. An error is an event. It enters somewhere, and on this section there are five places it can enter:

01The read
02The stem
03The pre-phrase
04The first pass
05Down to two

Review by explanation sees station five. Most points leave at the first four.

So the explanation arrives at the right scene at the wrong time. It examines the answer, which is the last thing that happened. What you needed was the sentence you skimmed four minutes earlier, and no explanation is going to hand you that.

The method puts something to do at each of the five places instead. Not advice about answers. A specific move at each point where a question can be lost, so that by the time you are choosing between two, most of the ways to choose wrong have already been closed off.

The free diagnostic names the error costing you most, the station of the five where it is born, and the rule that intercepts it there.

The method

Twelve rules, and one of them is ignore most of it.

Open any rule to see why it holds. Every one of them is checkable against an answer choice in the room.

Ninety minutes, fifty-three questions, roughly nine passages you have never seen. One loop, four moves: read so that a map comes out of it, work the questions off the map instead of your memory, hold every answer against a rule instead of an instinct, then write down what went wrong so it stops going wrong.

Steps, not tips. The difference is that steps compound, and a tip has to be remembered at exactly the moment you are least able to remember anything.

The topics rotate every year, and so does the bait. The moves underneath do not change, because the mistakes they need from you do not change. That is the fact that makes rules possible, and it is the reason this method does not age when the exam redecorates.

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, and that is the double whammy that turns a good section into a bad one.

Four words decide whether a paragraph is the author’s argument or somebody else’s. “This reply runs.” “On this view.” “The critics argued.” A reader who skates over them has a coherent, confident, wrong reading of the whole passage.

Concessions mark where two viewpoints touch. On a single passage they will frequently carry three of six answers, because the examiner knows a hurried reader converts “X is true and beside the point” into “X is false.”

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? From “walked the dog, hiked, jogged twice” you may conclude a somewhat active day. You may not conclude an active lifestyle, because lifestyle implies habit, and habit was not in evidence.

The choices you cannot immediately follow are disproportionately the correct ones, because a correct answer has to restate the passage in different words and that is what awkward prose looks like. Students eliminate them for precisely the reason they should be kept.

Correct answers restate the passage in different words. They have to, or the question would measure whether you can perform a string search instead of whether you can reason. Recognition is not evidence. It is the bait, and it is the single most expensive habit a strong student brings to this section.

All twelve are in the book →

Prove it

One question.
Pick the wrong one on purpose.

Here is the passage again, because the method never asks you to answer from memory. Choose any answer, including a wrong one on purpose, and it will name the Line you crossed and the station where the error was born. That exchange is what a tutoring hour is made of, run once.

Written for this site. It has never appeared on an MCAT.

Reasoning within the textmicro · inference

Advocates of participation grades argue that they reward the students who engage with a class, not only the ones who test well.

Critics reply that although the intention is fair, what a grader can actually see is who talks, so the policy rewards the confident student and quietly penalizes the thoughtful one.

The critics’ objection is best described as the claim that participation grades:

Michael Egenthal, Esq.

Michael Egenthal, Esq. · San Diego

Who wrote this

A lawyer, which is a strange qualification until you look at the section.

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.

The large courses were built for the sections made of science, where there is content to teach and drill, and they do that job well. CARS is the one section with no content to know, so what a content course can offer it is whatever strategy is left over. The CARS specialists are the other half of the picture. They are genuinely focused, they supply more passages than a student could finish, and they are worth recommending for exactly that. What comes with the passages is explanations, and an explanation arrives after the clock has stopped. It can say which answer was right. It cannot say where in your own reading the point was lost, because it never watched you read.

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.

One to one, if you want it

I take a few students at a time, so there is not always a slot. It starts with fifteen minutes on the phone, free and without a pitch: where you are, when you test, whether we would work well together, and what it costs. San Diego, or video anywhere. Most people should start with the book.

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The book

MCAT CARS:
The Definitive Approach

Twelve rules, sixteen errors, and twenty original passages. Twenty-two years in the making.

The front cover of MCAT CARS: The Definitive Approach, by Michael Egenthal. The title MCAT CARS is set large in serif capitals, an amber rule runs beneath it, and The Definitive Approach sits under the rule in italic. Lower down, printed bare on the paper with no box around it, is a marked sentence from a passage: the conceded clause carries an amber highlight labelled what they concede, and the clause after it is underlined in blue and labelled what they came to say. The amber of the rule and the amber of the highlight are the same colour.

The full method. The twelve rules with their proofs, worked examples taken start to finish, twenty original passages, and the charting system that turns your own wrong answers into the only study document ever written specifically about you.

12rules, each one checkable against an answer choice
20original passages, written to the real constraints
1charting system that turns your errors into the study plan
Look inside1 / 5

A few of the pages, turned by hand. The rest ship between covers.

mcatcars.comthe sample

The sample ends here.
The rules, their proofs, twenty passages, and the charting system ship with the book.

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mcatcars.comcontinued in print
MCAT CARS: The Definitive Approach
The
Twelve
Rules
Michael Egenthal, Esq.

On this section, the right answer is rarely the one you can talk yourself into. It is the one you cannot talk yourself out of.

from the introduction
The Twelve, one page
01Wrong in ten seconds or right in ninety. Never wrong slowly.
02Withheld until the book ships.
03Topic and role after every paragraph. A few abbreviated words. Never the thesis written out.
04Withheld until the book ships.
05Mark every concession. The real point is on the far side of it.
06Retrieval or inference. Decide before you read a single choice.
07Rephrase the stem. Every clause. And know whose view you are answering from.
08Withheld until the book ships.
09Name the leap. It must be true, not could be true.
10Withheld until the book ships.
11Passage language is a warning. Synonyms are the tell.
12Withheld until the book ships.
the twelveseven shown
Chapter V · where the theme sentence hides

I have watched twenty-two years of students agree that the first job of the read is the big theme, and then miss the theme anyway. The reason is nearly always the same. They take the first sentence of the paragraph to be the theme sentence, and the people writing the exam know that is the natural place to look.

So the theme sentence gets buried. Second sentence, third, sometimes the fourth, with a warm-up line or a transition standing where you expected the point to be. A paragraph opening with consider the case of the Willendorf excavation has not told you its theme. It has told you its example, and the theme is waiting two sentences downstream. The middle paragraphs are where this happens most.

the initial readfrom the book
The read, marked

Critics reply that although the intention is fair, what a grader can actually see is who talks, so the policy rewards the confident student and quietly penalizes the thoughtful one.

Line 5 · the concessionLeft of the comma is what both sides agree on. Right of it is the point the critics came to make, and the line goes under it because this sentence answers most of the set.
written for this sitethe two highlighters
Chapter VII · the thing you dislike

There is a phrase I want you to carry for this moment, because it is the difference between finding the answer and talking yourself out of it. There is often something we do not like about the correct answer, and that thing is non-fatal.

Not liking a choice is not a ground. Finding it graceless is not a ground. The only ground is that something in it is not inferable, and if you cannot point at that thing, you do not have a reason. You have a preference.

the answer choicesfrom the book
The chart · four columns, no exceptions
TypeSub-typeWhy I got it wrongPrevention
Passage languagereused phraseThe answer repeated “social cohesion” from paragraph 3 and familiarity read as proof.Ask what the words are doing, not whether I have seen them.
The leapcould, not mustChose an answer the passage permits over the one it requires.Name the leap out loud before the choices.

Two rows a week is a study plan. Two hundred passages without them is a diary nobody reads.

chapter xthe charting system

Your wrong answers are the only study document ever written specifically about you.

the chart

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