MCAT CARS Strategy Course - MCATbyJames

This is a culmination of 8 years in the making with diverse experiences from hundreds of students. I have designed this course with one thing in mind: to get meaning from what you are reading. In other words, to show you what you are reading, and why you are actually reading it. Many e to me not knowing where to even start and what to focus on, and this course was designed to tackle that head-on. CARS is the hardest section to improve on, but it is also the most heavily weighted section for all medical school applications. Breaking a 130 in CARS will give your application a significant advantage, and higher chances for the mittee to seriously look at your application. Unfortunately, there is no tip or trick in CARS. es from high quality practice and active guided reading. This course is meant to give you the proper mental structure, rather than just "tips" that you will see in other prep courses.

In the course, you will be going through 34 lesson plans dedicated to breaking down these passages to change your mental framework of how to approach passages in the correct way. I e you to check out my sample videos at the end of the page to see what you will be experiencing in the course. I strongly mend that you try this out for yourself and see how the answers "pop" out at you. Each video is between 20-40 minutes long.

By the end of it, my goal is to change the way you read. It's not about checking answers to see if you got it right or wrong, but it's to give you the critical thinking and reasoning skills to apply it to a variety of passages with a clear structure of how to break it down and what to look for. This type of critical thinking applies not just to the CARS section, but also the Biological Sciences, Physical Sciences and Psychology/Sociology sections. As the MCAT is entirely passage based, knowing how to properly approach a passage is without a doubt, the most important skill, much more than content retrieval and memorization.

If you are interested in learning more, please check out what some of my students have to say:

What will you learn in this course? -The Correct Approach to ANY CARS Passage -Paragraph by Paragraph Analysis -33+ Full Passage Dissections -ABC Method: Foundation of CARS - Learning how to make the ABC is fundamental to not only analyzing the passages correctly, but also answering questions easily and efficiently. -What & Why: What the Author Says vs. What the Author Means. CARS requires you to internalize a meaning rather than just get the bare surface details. -Tone: Arguably the most important element in CARS. Knowing the correct tone will naturally lead you to read the passages from the writer's perspective rather than the reader's perspective.

WHY choose MCATbyJAMES over big MCAT panies?

The main differences are results. In my past 8 years of professional teaching experience, I have taught over 300 students personally on a 1:1 and 5:1 basis with the majority of them matriculating into medical school the following year. My average student scores between a 520-525 consistently on the four AAMC official diagnostic exams listed on the main website with the average student finishing more than 35 full length exams by the time they officially write.

As a former medical student, and MCAT test-taker, I have scored a 41 (old MCAT) and a perfect 528 (new MCAT), and have been scouted as the lead tutor for many major panies during my years in medical school (for my full bio, please go to ). After helping my own peers through this process, I have designed this curriculum based on my personal experience and on what "works" and what "doesn't work" based on results.

There is an idea of a &plete" MCAT study program offered by a lot of big-name panies. The curriculum is based off of a structured grasp of material (which is actually well-organized by the way), and allows you to feel like you are getting a good grasp of the material. During this time, you will most likely be asked to study every fact in several hundred pages of text, every formula, and every figure. You may meticulously run through this material, e out as the master of theory in Kinematics, Cell Cycle and/or Nephron Physiology, but this does NOT work. This is possibly the worst way to study for the MCAT.

Whether or not you choose to study with me, you must realize that the MCAT is NOT a retrieval-based exam. It's less fact-based than you may think, and more dynamic with the way it tests the concepts, as it tests you on new passage-based, experimental information mixed in with theories that you already know. It is experimental, not semantic. It is an IQ test, not a memory test. It is a test on how to think, rather than just what you know.

Many of my e to me after being let down on how badly prepared they were on the official MCAT after taking courses with the big panies, but this is actually not their fault. In truth, Princeton/Kaplan's curriculum is designed to make you feel good about yourself, for a feeling of "progress." Despite dedicating yourself to their notes, powerpoint presentations, and quite arbitrary (and very basic) formula-based questions, you may feel like you are progressing, but a lot of students lack direction in how to actually read passages, how to approach the questions and even what passage information to focus on and read. A lot of top panies offering these &plete" study programs are so passive and lecture-based that I genuinely believe self-studying would even be more efficient and less time-consuming as you can go at your own pace and understand the material more thoroughly.

Even if your baseline for the sciences and for CARS is quite low, as long as e with an active mind and a willingness to work hard (and also make mistakes), I will guide you through the structure of the MCAT the way the AAMC writers see it. You will be able to read each type of passage with confidence and learn the correct approach to break down even the most difficult "killer" passages. That is my guarantee.

For more information about me, my Programs, Curriculum and Testimonial Videos, please visit my website at:

Get enrolled in my CARS online course here:

Still not sure? Check out my free online resources here: