What the CARS Section Actually Tests
When the Association of American Medical Colleges redesigned the MCAT in 2015, it replaced the previous Verbal Reasoning section with Critical Analysis and Reasoning Skills, commonly abbreviated CARS — a change that was more than cosmetic. Unlike the exam’s three science sections, CARS draws exclusively from the humanities and social sciences — philosophy, history, ethics, cultural studies — and deliberately excludes any passage requiring outside scientific knowledge, testing instead a test-taker’s ability to understand, analyze, and reason about unfamiliar written arguments purely from the text provided. The section’s persistence through the 2015 redesign, even as nearly everything else about the exam changed, reflected a deliberate judgment by medical educators: the ability to carefully parse a complex, unfamiliar argument — a skill physicians need when evaluating everything from research literature to a patient’s account of their own history — doesn’t show up on a biology exam, and needed a section built specifically to measure it.
CARS passages are typically drawn from published essays, articles, and excerpts spanning a wide range of subjects, deliberately chosen so that no test-taker has a built-in content advantage; a philosophy major and a biochemistry major are meant to face the same passage with the same available information. Questions generally fall into three categories: foundations of comprehension, which test basic understanding of what a passage states; reasoning within the text, which test how well a reader can trace an author’s logic and infer conclusions the passage implies but doesn’t state outright; and reasoning beyond the text, which test whether a reader can apply a passage’s argument to new situations or evaluate how new information would strengthen or weaken it.
Aristotle, Logic, and the Roots of Critical Reasoning
The formal study of argument structure that CARS questions implicitly draw on traces back to ancient Greek philosophy, and specifically to Aristotle, who in the fourth century BCE wrote systematically about syllogisms — logical arguments built from a major premise, a minor premise, and a conclusion that follows necessarily from the two. Aristotle’s work, later compiled into a collection known as the Organon, represented the first attempt to formally catalog the patterns that make an argument valid or invalid independent of whether its conclusion happens to be true, a distinction — validity versus truth — that remains central to how logicians and critical readers evaluate arguments today.
Recognizing informal logical fallacies, patterns of flawed reasoning that can make a weak argument feel persuasive despite failing to logically support its conclusion, is a skill with an equally long history: rhetoricians have cataloged fallacies like circular reasoning, false dilemmas, and appeals to authority for centuries, refining the list as new patterns of flawed argument were identified. None of this history is itself tested on the MCAT — CARS questions ask you to evaluate the specific passage in front of you, not to define “syllogism” — but the underlying skill of separating an argument’s logical structure from its emotional or rhetorical appeal is exactly what more than two thousand years of formal logic and rhetoric were built to teach, and it’s the same skill CARS passages are designed to measure under time pressure.
Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica.