Some thoughts about CARS wrong answers

Hello everyone! Kelly here.

I get asked about CARS a lot. Like- a LOT. Even my best students struggle with consistently doing well on CARS. It feels like a game of chance, they tell me. Either they get practice passages that make sense and questions they can answer, or the passage is terrible and the question answers are a reach, at best. And practice doesn't always feel like it helps- it's not like studying for chemistry or physics, which have discrete knowledge foundations you can rely on. No, CARS is entirely skill-based, and the skill feels like something you're either born good at, or you're not.

Well, first, that's not objectively true. You can "git gud" at CARS, because it IS a skill you can build like any other. Practice does help- and you need a lot of it- because CARS questions tend to come in certain patterns. You will certainly be asked about the main idea, for example. You'll be asked to reason within the text and beyond the text. You'll be asked some basic comprehension questions. But what I think many students don't think about is that writing these tests, from the POV of those of us who make practice MCATs, is really hard. You can take advantage of the heuristics that test-writers use to make this task easier, and to make the test fair.

There are only so many ways to write a wrong answer that's both plausible at first glance and defensibly incorrect. For example, a typical strategy for writing a good wrong answer involves pulling phrases or whole sentences directly from the passage. The goal is to get you to pick that wrong answer by virtue of being familiar, something you recognize and get a good feeling about. Yes, I've read this before! But this quote or paraphrase simply doesn't answer the question posed.

Imagine you read a passage by a writer who is discussing the concept of the Improbability Drive and its meta-narrative from Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. A wrong answer choice to one question might quote the passage directly, which in turn was quoting the book: "He couldn’t understand what a building would be doing flying through the clouds. On the other hand, he would have been a little hard pressed to come up with any convincing explanation of his own presence, so he decided that he and the building were just going to have to accept each other."

Now, you recognize that, because you read the passage, and it quoted that line. Feels good, right? But the question being posed was "How does the passage writer refute the criticisms of the Improbability Drive theory?" The question is asking for a refutation- an insistence that another point of view is wrong. The answer choice given above is just a quote from the book that the passage used. No criticisms are mentioned, no refutation is made, no Improbability Drive is mentioned, just a humorous statement personifying a building. Don't get pulled into the "familiarity" trap.

Other wrong answers may commonly fall into patterns like directly contradicting the main idea (hoping to fool you if you didn't take the time to consider the main idea at all), being so complex as to be nonsensical and hoping you'll give up and pick it, and making assertions that go beyond the scope of the passage. That last one trips people up- what if I included an answer choice to the question above that asserted the passage writer was friends with Douglas Adams? You might think "oh, were they friends? That could explain it." But you should reject this outright. If the passage writer didn't say it, and the question stem doesn't instruct you to assume it's true, it's false. It doesn't matter how good of an explanation it would be, there's simply no evidence for it.

Look for those patterns, and keep grinding. You can do it.