Reading the Passage
By the end of this lesson:
- You will understand what you need to take away from non-CARS passages on the MCAT
- Have practiced the basic passage reading approach
- Be able to implement this strategy on other MCAT materials
Mindset
At first, passages are going to seem intimidating and that is totally normal. Even after 5 years of teaching the MCAT full time, there are passages that I don’t fully understand. And you know what I can still get all the questions about that passage right.
Why? Because you don’t have to understand the passage as well as you might think. For many of my students, this is a mindset shift from struggling to get every detail of a passage down to focusing on the big picture.
What Do We Need?
To get the big picture out of a passage we need to know very generally what was discussed and where that information was discussed. For example, consider the following opening paragraph of a passage.
Multiple myeloma (MM) is a hematological malignancy characterized by the clonal proliferation of plasma cells in the bone marrow. The differences in the efficacy of specific therapeutic strategies for MM, and different times of chemoresistance development imply the need to identify risk stratification factors that would enable the personalization of therapy and improvement of treatment outcomes.
Adapted from: Multiple Myeloma: Circulating Serum MiRNA-8074 as a Novel Prognostic Biomarker for Multiple Myeloma, Anita Szudy-Szcyrek et al CC-BY 4.0
At the highest level, what is this paragraph about? Multiple myeloma (a topic you are expected to know nothing about) and therapies or treatments and that is all you need to take away from this paragraph.
If you didn’t understand everything in those first couple of sentences don’t sweat it and do your best to resist the urge to reread stuff. So long as you are able to get the gist of what is going on you should be good to go.
We can always come back to the passage when a question asks about a specific portion and interpret what we didn’t fully understand as needed. This means we need to be able to find that information again in an efficient manner.
Highlighting (Alt+H)
This is where we will use highlighting (shortcut Alt+H on the MCAT) to create ”landmarks” to help us find information later. When highlighting we are only looking to highlight a couple of words in each paragraph that capture the major ideas there. Any more than that and your highlights become harmful rather than helpful because if everything is highlighted then nothing is.
We will always pick our highlights after we finish reading a paragraph. This ensures that we aren’t getting distracted by trying to highlight while reading and gives us a second chance to pause and consider what is important.
When determining what is important we will consider two major factors: repetition and level of detail. If an idea or term is repeated it is likely important since the author(s) spends more than one sentence discussing it. Therefore repeated terms tend to make good highlights.
Often times questions will require us to understand some of the specific details in the passage. Despite this these details tend to make poor highlights as it often difficult to determine which ones aren’t important and which ones are. Therefore we will aim to highlight less detailed introductory statements that way we will have a landmark for the specific details that follow.
For example, our highlights for that first paragraph look something like this:
Multiple myeloma (MM) is a hematological malignancy characterized by the clonal proliferation of plasma cells in the bone marrow. The differences in the efficacy of specific therapeutic strategies for MM, and different times of chemoresistance development imply the need to identify risk stratification factors that would enable the personalization of therapy and improvement of treatment outcomes.
Adapted from: Multiple Myeloma: Circulating Serum MiRNA-8074 as a Novel Prognostic Biomarker for Multiple Myeloma, Anita Szudy-Szcyrek et al CC-BY 4.0
In this case, we highlighted multiple myeloma because it is both repeated and a broad topic.
You will notice that I didn’t highlight all the information about bone marrow, plasma cells, and clonal proliferation. This is purposeful. The paragraph is about multiple myeloma those are just extra details that describe multiple myeloma.
So if a question asks about the specific features of multiple myeloma I will know to look around that first highlight and can pull up all of that information about the immune system when I need it. If I had also highlighted that information my highlights would begin to lose meaning and become harder to navigate.
Now let talk about why therapeutic strategies would also make a good highlight.
Multiple myeloma (MM) is a hematological malignancy characterized by the clonal proliferation of plasma cells in the bone marrow. The differences in the efficacy of specific therapeutic strategies for MM, and different times of chemoresistance development imply the need to identify risk stratification factors that would enable the personalization of therapy and improvement of treatment outcomes.
Adapted from: Multiple Myeloma: Circulating Serum MiRNA-8074 as a Novel Prognostic Biomarker for Multiple Myeloma, Anita Szudy-Szcyrek et al CC-BY 4.0
Here I chose to highlight therapeutic strategies because it is a big picture idea that is related to multiple myeloma. Not only does this idea connect to our first highlight helping to tie our understanding the paragraph together it also captures a broad idea that this paragraph then discusses in greater detail.
Skip The Figures
Often times the passages will also contain figures and an associated caption. These figures could be chemical structures, graphs, pathway diagrams, experimental setups, etc. It is really tempting to try and interpret them as you read the passage.
We are going to resist this temptation skip the figure entirely, read the caption, highlight something from that caption, and move on. The AAMC doesn’t always ask questions about every figure in a passage and furthermore, it can be difficult to even determine what to pull out of a figure without a question in front of you.
Remember the goal here is to know what the figure talks about not what the figure actually says. We will need to know how to interpret figures and it is something we will cover later, but it should only be used in the context of a specific question that requires you to actually interpret that graph. Not when reading the passage for the first time.
For example, let’s see how we would tackle the following figure if we came across it in a passage.
As you can see in this example we didn’t bother with the interpretation we simply skipped the graph and read the caption. We still know what this graph shows us, something about macrophages and gene expression and if a question asks us about that we can always go back and interpret the data presented in the graph.
What Should I Take Away?
By the end of the passage, you should know what the passage is discussing at a surface level as well as where different pieces of information are. Really that is it. Don’t worry if you didn’t understand the whole experimental setup or all the details of a specific pathway being discussed we can worry about that later when a question actually asks about it.
To do this take an extra 30 seconds to look over your highlights and summarize the “landmark points” of the passage. Basically, just rerun through those highlights so you have a better sense of where to find important pieces of information.
Putting Everything Together
Now that we have discussed all of the portions of our reading strategy let’s recap what we have learned and see how everything come together on three practice passages.
Practice- Coming Soon
Now that you have seen how this strategy works let’s practice.
Below you will find practice passages followed by a walkthrough of each passage. First, try the passage on your own then watch the walkthrough and compare.