Every MCAT science passage contains more information than any single question requires — and that's not incidental, it's the design. Understanding why changes how you should read passages in the first place.
Unlike a content-recall exam, the MCAT hands you the relevant facts, data, and context directly in the passage — the real skill being tested is identifying which pieces of that information actually matter for the question in front of you, under time pressure, while ignoring the rest.
Students who did well in undergraduate coursework are often trained to read for comprehensive understanding — absorb everything, because any of it might be tested later. That instinct actively works against you on the MCAT, where the passage is deliberately padded with real but irrelevant detail: extra experimental controls, background context that doesn't bear on the question, numerical data that's a distractor for a specific wrong answer choice.
Passages generally contain two categories of information. Setup is context you need to understand what's being studied — what the experiment is, what's being measured. Payload is the specific data or relationship a given question is actually testing. Strong MCAT readers learn to identify setup quickly without over-processing it, then locate payload precisely when a question calls for it.
If a passage describes three experimental conditions but a question only asks about the relationship shown in Figure 2, the details of the other two conditions are very likely setup, not payload, for that specific question — even though they're genuinely part of the passage's content.
First pass: read for structure, not detail — what's being studied, what the main comparison or manipulation is, roughly what each figure shows. Don't try to absorb every number. Second pass: once you have a specific question, go back to the passage and extract exactly the data point or relationship that question is asking about.
This same skill — identifying what's structurally important versus what's supporting detail — is exactly what CARS is testing directly, without the science content layered on top. If information triage is a weak spot in the science sections, it's very likely showing up in CARS as well, and vice versa.