Here are some recommendations to improve your CARS score:
1. Read more! Focus on the topics that you don’t like — I’m looking at you dense philosophy passages. Arts and Letters Daily has a great collection of journals across a wide range of disciplines. Choose five to seven paragraphs of an article and read it like you would a CARS passage. You can also copy it into a text-editing program to practice highlighting.
2. Work on some untimed practice to hone your comprehension. Focus on going slowly to tease apart arguments and identify author opinions. Remember that you will never see the same passage twice, so this is about the process, not the individual passage. The CARS Office Hours are a great resource for some instructor led discussions.
3. Change up how you review questions you missed. Instead of reading the explanation and going, “Oh, that makes sense,” try reverse engineering the explanation. You know what the correct answer is, can you justify why it is correct and why the other answers are wrong? Coming up with your own explanation before you look at the provided copy will build your critical thinking skills.
4. Identify why you are missing questions. Take some time to review the module “CARS Questions: Identifying Wrong Answers” and then do an analysis of the answers you selected. Do you tend to fall for a particular type of wrong answer? If so, what changes can you make in your approach to avoid making the same mistake?
