Types of Questions on the CARS Section of the MCAT

Need help preparing for the MCAT CARS (Critical Analysis and Reasoning) section? MedSchoolCoach expert, Ken Tao, will disclose and discuss the different types of questions on the CARS section of the MCAT exam. Watch this video to find out what they are and how to answer them correctly so that you can score well on the MCAT!

The MCAT is a standardized exam, meaning that it's designed to provide you with a reliable score across multiple administrations of the exam. Therefore, the exam is designed with similar types of questions that crop up with particular templates, which you can identify and use to your advantage when answering questions. Identifying that a question is of a particular type can clue you in on how to start thinking about that question, what kinds of information to apply, and whether or not to revisit the passage. There are three types of questions on the MCAT CARS section: foundations of comprehension (making up 30% of the questions), reasoning within the text questions (another 30%), and reasoning beyond the text questions (40%).

There are two subtypes of foundations of comprehension questions: ones that involve understanding the basic components of the text, and others that involve your ability to infer meaning from rhetorical devices or choices in text structure. There's only one type of reasoning within the text question: integrating different components of the text to increase comprehension. Reasoning beyond the text has two subtypes: applying or extrapolating ideas from the passage's new contexts, and assessing the impact of introducing new factors, information or conditions to the ideas of the passage.

Examples of Questions

An example of a foundations of comprehension question might be, “the passage suggests that X was Y because ___”, where X and Y represent specific topics that were described in the passage. It’s a straightforward question, not asking you to do any complex analysis. It's really just asking, what is the text saying about why X is Y? Other questions might be, “what does the author or passage imply about X?”, or, “the author's use of the term X most likely refers to what?”

For reasoning within the text, an example might be, “The use of X within the text was most likely implying what?” This question does not refer to something explicitly mentioned or observable in the text. Here, we’ll often find ourselves asking about the author’s motivations or intentions in including a particular word or sentence.

Reasoning beyond the text is often characterized by us being asked to extrapolate passage information to a new context or introduce new information to the passage and determine how it impacts the claims in the passage. For example, the question, “The information in the passage most strongly supports which general statement?” is asking you to draw out the information in the passage to a new context. We must understand the arguments of the passage and figure out the implications those arguments have in a new context. Conversely, another question might ask, “If this additional information was true, how would that affect the arguments of the passage?”. In this case, additional context outside of the passage is given to us, and we must apply that to our understanding of the passage.

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