Why is CARS the most important section for medical schools?

Critical Analysis and Reasoning Skills or CARS as it is typically known is the second section you will see on the MCAT on Test Day. It is a 90-minute section comprising of 53 passage-based questions. It is also the section that students dislike and fear the most. Why?

For one reason, it is the section that students are most unfamiliar with (you can’t use your science knowledge to do well on CARS) and this causes anxiety. Second, it is the most heavily weighted section and the section that medical school admissions teams pay the most attention to.

In this section, essentially, you will be presented with a passage that is approx. 500-700 words long followed by a series of 4-6 questions based on that text. The questions can ask about the argument the author makes, what the underlying assumptions are or additional information that could weaken or strengthen the conclusion, amongst other types of questions. MCAT CARS topics come from the Humanities or Social Sciences and include:

• Architecture
• Art
• Dance
• Ethics
• Literature
• Music
• Philosophy
• Popular Culture
• Religion
• Theatre
• Anthropology
• Archaeology
• Economics
• Education
• Geography
• History
• Linguistics
• Political Science
• Population Health
• Psychology
• Sociology

Now that you know a little about CARS, why is it important?

Medical schools, especially Canadian medical schools LOVE this section because it evaluates test takers’ ability to extract and analyze information from the novel text and combine the information with reasoning skills to answer questions.

In fact, the critical thinking skills required to do well on CARS are analogous to the processes that physicians use daily in diagnosing, recommending treatment plans and essentially when practicing medicine! As a physician, when seeing a patient you will not be presented with classic textbook examples or a checklist through which you work through and reach a conclusion at the end. Instead, you will hear a story of symptoms, family history and even seemingly unrelated information that your patient feels is necessary to share with you. Your job will be to sift through it all, recognize patterns, ignore anything extraneous and connect the details to see the larger picture to ultimately recommend the right course of action – on your feet! The CARS section of the MCAT tests exactly this – the only difference being that on the MCAT you will not be presented with medical scenarios!

The value that medical schools place on CARS is not hearsay; research and data over years of performance on CARS (what was formerly known as the Verbal section) indicate that there is a positive correlation between a test taker’s CARS score and their performance on board exams. In fact, it is so important that some Canadian medical schools will only examine your CARS score and not factor in your performance on the other three sections of the MCAT.

KEY TAKEAWAY
The CARS section SHOULD NOT BE UNDERESTIMATED! It is not simply reading comprehension as many students think it is. From our years of teaching expertise at Prep101, we can tell you that most students do not give sufficient time to honing and strengthening CARS skills. Even putting your CARS score and performance on this section of the MCAT aside, use this score as a personal means to gauge your ability to reason in the face of new information, use it as a yardstick of what kind of future physician you think you will make.