MCAT Passages for RC Practice Forum

[cesmoc]

So there has been a lot of threads recently about the difficulty of recent RC sections (54, 55, 59, etc.) and I definitely agree with this sentiment. I've taken every PT except for 55 (I'm taking that on Wednesday) and I have been re-doing RC sections to practice them. However, I still remember answers and the general structure of the passages which is definitely inflating my scores. So besides reading dense publications like the Economist, WSJ, and Scientific American, what do you guys think of doing some MCAT passages just as extra practice?

I searched this topic and saw that people in the past thought these passages were decent practice before you started using real LSAT materials so I wonder what people think about doing them so close to the test date.

Thanks!

[tomwatts]

Inflated scores are not a bad thing; just getting the practice of seeing how questions worked over again is actually useful at building LSAT skills, even if it's not giving you realistic scores. If you do decide to do a few MCAT passages, they'll look a little odd, but that won't hurt you as long as you only mix in a few alongside continuing to repeat LSAT passages and doing PT 55.

In general, MCAT passages are more aimless (they don't focus on one central point or contain paragraphs that focus on a single point to the same degree as LSAT passages do), and MCAT question types are not always the same as LSAT ones (so a few question stems will look odd), while the right answers are not always as directly supported as LSAT right answers are. It's just a flakier test, noticeably so.