For most people, yes — but not for the reason you'd guess. CARS isn't harder because the passages are smarter than the science sections. It's harder because it's the one section you can't beat by memorizing more. There's no content to cram: passages cover philosophy, ethics, and art history — stuff you'll probably never formally study — and the questions test how you reason about an argument you've never seen, under time pressure, with answer choices built to bait you.

That's why people who crush the science sections can still stall out here. The upside: because CARS is a skill, not a pile of facts, it's actually the most improvable section once you train the right way.

Stop treating it like a volume problem. Doing hundreds of passages without a method just locks in whatever you're already doing wrong — practice makes it permanent. Real improvement comes from changing how you read and reason: read for the author's argument instead of every word, learn to recognize the wrong-answer traps (too extreme, half-right, true-but-irrelevant), and review every miss by asking why the trap was tempting — not just what the right answer was.

That last habit is where most of the gains actually happen, and it's the step most people skip. Build a steady pace you can hold for nine passages instead of sprinting through one.

Fewer than you think — usually 3 to 5, but only if you actually review each one. One passage you break down completely teaches you more than ten you rush through and grade. The review is the learning; the passage is just raw material.

CARS also takes real focus, and once your reading gets sloppy you're just practicing bad habits while feeling productive. The one rule that holds up is consistency: three passages a day, six days a week, with real review, beats twenty crammed into a Saturday — because skills fade without regular reps.

Read for the argument, not the details. Your goal isn't to memorize the passage — you can always look back — it's to understand what the author is claiming and how strongly, so you could predict how they'd answer. When you read for structure instead of absorbing every word, you answer most questions from understanding instead of frantically re-reading, which is also what makes you faster.

The students who run out of time are almost always the ones who read passively and then have to reconstruct everything during the questions. Fix the reading and the clock mostly takes care of itself. And when an answer just "feels right," slow down — that's exactly when the traps catch you.

Yes — and the evidence is real. CARS doesn't test vocabulary or reading speed; it tests reasoning: analyzing an argument, weighing evidence, and avoiding tempting-but-wrong answers. Those are logic skills, not language ones. One of our students went from a 120 to a 129 on CARS and told us English wasn't her first language.

The two things that actually trip up multilingual students are pacing (an unfamiliar word slowing you down) and second-guessing your own comprehension — and both are fixable. Read for the overall argument so one unknown word doesn't derail you, and lean on a reliable decision process you can trust instead of a gut feeling. Train the process and that "barrier" turns out to be smaller than it looks.