MCAT CARS Passages: Where to Get Them, and How Many a Day

By MCAT Study Planner Team • Updated 10/28/2026

Short answer: 63 CARS passages are available right now without paying anything or starting a trial, and at 3 passages a day they run out in 21 days. We counted every source on October 28, 2026 and divided each price by the passages it buys.

Every page ranking on this search tells you that CARS is 9 passages in 90 minutes. The AI Overview tells you the same thing, in more detail, before you click anything.

None of them tells you how many passages the thing they are recommending actually contains. That is the number that decides your week.

In this guide

• Every source of CARS passages, counted and priced
• The 63 free passages, and the 21 days they last
• Khan Academy did not retire its MCAT course
• What one CARS passage costs, once you divide
• The top result for this search is a PDF from 2018
• How many passages a day your calendar implies
• What the AAMC says a CARS passage is made of
• Every source on one page

Every Source of CARS Passages, Counted and Priced

Every count and price below was read on the provider’s own page on October 28, 2026. Where a provider publishes no count, the table says so rather than guessing.

Three things in that table are worth saying out loud.

The AAMC question count is 575, which this site verified on the AAMC’s own product comparison on October 10, 2026, and the passage count is ours, not theirs. CARS runs 5 to 7 questions a passage, so 575 questions is somewhere between 82 and 115 passages. We use 96 throughout, which is the midpoint.

Jack Westin publishes 8 named CARS exams (Los Angeles, Chicago, History, Economics, Philosophy, Political Science, Art Architecture, Literature Theater) and 6 full lengths, and publishes no passage count for any of them. Our per-passage figure for Jack Westin assumes 9 passages an exam, and is marked as an assumption wherever it appears.

Four providers publish nothing countable: UWorld sells a $339 question bank and two CARS review books without a CARS passage figure anywhere, Bootcamp publishes neither a count nor a price on any public page we could reach, and Princeton Review’s CARS paths returned the site’s own 404 page on the day we checked.

The 63 Free Passages, and the 21 Days They Last

Add up only the sources that cost nothing and need no trial and no card: Khan Academy’s 36, the CARS section of AAMC Practice Exam 1, the CARS section of the Unscored Sample Test, and MedLife Mastery’s 9-passage diagnostic. That is 63 passages.

The People Also Ask box on this search asks whether 3 passages a day is good. Here is the part nobody answers: 63 divided by 3 is 21. Three a day empties every free CARS passage in three weeks.

At 2 a day you get 32 days. At 1 a day you get 63.

Jack Westin’s daily passage sits outside that arithmetic, because it is a flow and not a stock. One new passage every morning is 7 a week forever, and it is the only free source that does not run down.

Khan Academy Did Not Retire Its MCAT Course

The belief that Khan Academy’s MCAT collection is gone is everywhere, and it is wrong.

Its MCAT course page on October 28, 2026 said that Khan Academy “will continue to partner with AAMC for years to come, ensuring continued access to free, trusted, high-quality MCAT study resources for all learners.” All 15 units were live.

Unit 5 is the CARS set. We counted its contents from the unit’s own links: 36 practice passages and 9 videos, of which 4 are strategy lessons and 5 are worked walkthroughs of passages in the same unit.

That makes Khan Academy the largest free CARS passage source there is, by a factor of four over the next one. It is also the only source on this page with no account requirement, no trial clock and no card. If you want more than passages, the rest of the free landscape is in our guide to the best free MCAT resources.

What One CARS Passage Costs, Once You Divide

Price per passage is our arithmetic throughout: the provider’s published price divided by the provider’s published count, or by our stated assumption where they publish none.

The order surprises people. Official AAMC practice is not the expensive option here. Its question bank is the second cheapest thing in the table and roughly a tenth of the cost of a six-month Blueprint subscription per passage, because the subscription is priced for its 5,000 questions across all four sections and you are only counting the CARS part.

The AAMC also changed this product recently. The CARS Diagnostic Tool and CARS Question Packs Volumes 1 and 2 were discontinued and folded into the one CARS Question Bank on September 30, 2026. If you held any of the three, you can buy a 3-month subscription for $35 or a 6-month for $45 within 60 days of your old product expiring. Fee Assistance Program recipients get the bank free. We track the whole official lineup, bank by bank, in our breakdown of MCAT practice questions.

The Top Result for This Search Is a PDF from 2018

The page ranking first for “mcat cars passages” on October 28, 2026 is not a page. It is a PDF sitting in a WordPress uploads folder.

Its HTTP headers say content-type: application/pdf, content-length: 654709, and last-modified: Sun, 17 Jun 2018 09:16:56 GMT. The article that presumably once introduced it, at /mcat-cars-practice-passages/ on the same host, returns that site’s own “Oops! That page can’t be found” screen.

So the top result for this search is an eight-year-old file whose own site no longer links to it. We did not read its contents and make no claim about them. We are pointing at the date, because a CARS passage from June 2018 predates a decade of AAMC question-writing and nobody on page one mentions the file’s age.

That is the state of this search, and it is why the counts above are the point of this page.

How Many Passages a Day Your Calendar Implies

Work from your weeks, not from a number someone posted. The table assumes six study days a week, which is the cadence our timeline plans use.

Read it in the direction that helps. If you have 12 weeks and you want 3 passages a day, the free pool alone gives you 0.9, so you need a paid source from the start. If you have 4 weeks, the free pool already supports 2.6 a day and you may need nothing else.

Budget 10 minutes a passage from the AAMC’s own 90 minutes over 9, and about twice that again for reviewing it properly. Our full MCAT time breakdown carries the per-section pacing this site uses.

Once you know your weeks, your passage rate and the sources you are using, you can build the whole schedule around them instead of keeping it in your head. The planner takes your test date, your hours a week and the resources you have chosen, and places the work across the calendar.

What the AAMC Says a CARS Passage Is Made Of

This matters when you are judging whether a third-party passage is representative, which is the real risk of practising on 101 passages written by someone other than the AAMC.

CARS passages come from the humanities and the social sciences, and the AAMC names the disciplines on its own passage-types page. Humanities: architecture, art, dance, ethics, literature, music, philosophy, popular culture, religion, theater and studies of diverse cultures. Social sciences: anthropology, archaeology, economics, education, geography, history, linguistics, political science, population health, psychology, sociology and studies of diverse cultures.

The AAMC also distinguishes their tone. Social sciences passages “tend to be more factual and scientific in tone”, while humanities passages “often focus on the relationships between ideas and are more likely to be written in a conversational or opinionated style”.

Use that as a checklist against whatever you are practising on. A set that is all history and economics is not covering the humanities half, and Jack Westin’s named exams make that easy to audit because each one states its discipline on the tin.

Passages are the raw material. What you do with one is a different skill, and that is the subject of our guide to the best way to study for MCAT CARS.

Every Source on One Page

The short version: Khan Academy first because it is free and the biggest, the AAMC CARS Question Bank next because it is official and costs less a passage than anything except a used book, and Jack Westin’s morning passage running underneath all of it for as long as you are studying.

Then put the rate you chose into the study plan the rest of your weeks have to fit, so the passages land on real days alongside your content review and your full lengths.