My MCAT Study Materials
How I maximized use of my prep materials
It’s been about a week since I took the (shortened) MCAT. It’s a little surreal that a test I devoted the past six months to is finally over. I’ll be receiving my results soon, and instead of spending all my time worrying about it, I decided to redirect my energy toward creating a blog post about how I studied for the test. In the next few paragraphs, I’ll review each resource I used.
1. Kaplan Test Prep MCAT Complete 7-Book Subject Review 2020–2021 (Comes with 3 Full-Length Practice Exams)
Review: I began content review in January 2020 using this book set. I was able to finish all the books — including all the discrete questions at the end of each section and chapter — by March 2020. Each book is pretty detailed, which was helpful for me because I really needed in-depth content review, especially for topics I hadn’t covered in a while (e.g. Physics). The Biochemistry book was particularly useful because I didn’t take a Biochemistry course in my undergrad or post-bac studies. The CARS book was least useful for me because I was already comfortable with and confident in my note-taking and highlighting methods so I didn’t feel the need to change them to match the strategies described in the book.
As for the discrete practice questions at the end of each section and chapter, they are not similar to the AAMC’s discrete questions on the full-length practice exams at all (or even on my actual exam), but they were helpful in showing me my weak areas in the topics covered in that section/chapter. I recommend doing them all and then reviewing all the rationales given for the correct answers (and explanations for the incorrect answers as well) provided on a separate page. The online practice questions offered with each chapter are identical to those in the book.
The full-length (FL) exams are good practice to build stamina and apply major topics, but they are very different from the AAMC FL’s in terms of question types, word choice, and rationales. I wouldn’t worry too much about scores on these FL’s just because they’re not representative of the real thing.
2. Khan Academy (KA) MCAT Course Videos
Review: In addition to the Kaplan books for content review, the KA MCAT videos (created in partnership with the AAMC) were an extremely helpful resource for understanding difficult concepts. They have videos and practice questions/passages for every subject covered on the test.
Unfortunately, this resource will only be accessible for free until September 30, 2020. This announcement was made by the AAMC on Twitter sometime in the past couple of months, and I still don’t understand why they made the decision to discontinue the free resource (and in the middle of a global pandemic). Well actually, I can think of a reason, and it rhymes with “schmoney.”
Anyway, I used these KA videos whenever I had difficulty understanding a concept. For example, as I mentioned in the previous section, I didn’t take Biochem in school, so I had to learn all of it on my own using just the Kaplan book. For high-yield processes like the Citric Acid Cycle and Glycolysis, I used the KA videos to better understand each step. These topics appear on every single MCAT FL and on the actual exam.
For example, take these glycolysis diagrams below:
I understood the Kaplan explanations on the topic, but printing out these KA diagrams, putting them up on my wall, and referring back to them after taking a full-length exam really helped me memorize each step, the corresponding enzyme involved, and the net ATP yield of the process. Encoding this diagram into memory helped me score easy points on my actual exam.
As you’ll find on the Reddit pre-med and MCAT threads, the KA Psychology and Sociology (P/S) videos are essential to MCAT prep. If you have a lot of time, I suggest watching them all, maybe at 1.25x or 1.5x speed. If you don’t have time to watch them all, I’ll provide links to summaries of these videos in the next section.
Lastly, if you run out of CARS passages, KA has a bunch of practice CARS passages you can do as well.
3. Reddit 86-page KA P/S doc and MCATBros 300-page KA P/S doc
Review: I think that aside from CARS, the P/S section on the MCAT was the easiest for me. Memorizing the vocabulary words is a sure way to improve your score in this section. A few years ago, a Reddit user, augjram, created an 86-page doc for us that condensed all the necessary information from the KA videos. Additionally, MCATBros has an updated 300-page doc that summarizes all the KA P/S videos as well, in more detail. Both documents are extremely helpful because they have all the content you need for the P/S section on the MCAT.
4. NextStep (Blueprint MCAT) FL 1 — shortened version for 2020
Review: After finishing all the Kaplan questions, I decided to try another third-party FL. I chose NextStep because the Reddit MCAT threads suggested that their FL’s were most representative after the AAMC materials. Additionally, this FL was free. I received a good score on this FL and really appreciated the extensive rationales provided for each question. For example, if the question was asking about operant conditioning, but the answer choices included classical conditioning, avoidance learning, extinction, and habituation, all the terms would be defined thoroughly in the rationale for that question. The Chemistry/Physics (C/P) and Biology/Biochemistry (B/B) sections were great, but I think the CARS passages were more difficult than the AAMC passages. The P/S section was too easy compared to the AAMC questions. My score on this FL matched my score on the AAMC FL 1, but the distribution didn’t match, so I relied on the AAMC scores more.
5. AAMC MCAT Official Prep Bundle
Review: As you’ll find reiterated in every MCAT prep article or post, the AAMC’s MCAT prep bundle is singlehandedly the most important resource to purchase for this test. The bundle includes a sample test, question packs, a section bank, four FL’s, flashcards, and online practice questions. After content review and toward the end of your prep-the final month (or a little longer) before your test date-you should focus solely on the AAMC materials. This will help familiarize you with the way the ask questions, the type of questions, their word choice, and most importantly their rationales. While having a solid content foundation is important, knowing how to apply the content to their questions is equally important.
I recommend taking the Sample Test early on in your prep, maybe after finishing your third-party FL’s or even before any other ones. It’s unscored but will give you a feel for the AAMC questions. The flashcards and question packs were good for content review because they required just basic content retrieval and application of vocabulary words and common equations. The section bank was the most useful after the FL’s because the questions in it (both discrete and the passages) were extremely difficult. Don’t be alarmed if you’re scoring poorly on them because it was difficult to even average a 60% on all of them. This seems to be a common experience with the section bank as you’ll find on Reddit. Being exposed to this level of difficulty will make the real MCAT less intimidating. I found some passages from the section bank to be more difficult than passages I encountered on the real thing.
Save the FL’s for last, after all your content review is done and you’ve had a chance to review your notes more than once. You should see your score trend improve as you become more familiar with their question style and the types of tables, graphs, and figures that they include in their passages.
One thing I didn’t like with the AAMC questions was that the rationales for the correct answers were often lacking in depth compared to both NS and Kaplan. They don’t always explain why the other options are incorrect or even why the correct answer is the most correct. They definitely need to improve this component.
Final Thoughts
That’s about all the materials I used for my MCAT prep. There are other third-party prep materials (e.g. Examkrackers, The Princeton Review, UWorld, et.c) that are available, and I recommend doing your research on all of them before committing to one or two (depending on your budget and amount of time available for MCAT prep) because they’re all pretty expensive and time-consuming. I’ve heard really good things about UWorld in particular, and I wish I’d had the time to try them out.
Regardless of the materials you choose to use, my biggest pieces of advice are the following:
- Don’t rush through content review. The reason the exam is so long is because the scope of material that’s covered is so broad. Having a solid understanding of all the major topics will make you more confident and efficient when presented with a question on the exam, no matter how difficult it may be. If there’s a topic that you intended to cover in one day, but find that it’s requiring more time, then allot more time to it and adjust your schedule accordingly. Everyone begins MCAT prep at a different point in their pre-med journey, and just because it took one person only two months to study doesn’t mean you should expect to finish in the same amount of time.
- Maximize your use of all the resources that you have. For all the major topics you review, compare the way that it’s explained across all your study materials (e.g. the Citric Acid Cycle as explained in Kaplan vs. Khan Academy vs. the AAMC). Don’t be afraid to Google a question that you don’t understand from the practice sets and FL’s because there’s a big chance that it stumped someone else too. Reddit was invaluable in providing insight on specific questions from the AAMC FL’s when I felt that the rationale provided by the AAMC was insufficient. If you finish reviewing all the books in your set and taking notes on them, review your notes over and over. Rewrite them if you need to or make flashcards for vocabulary words. Review them in a different order than presented in the book. There’s no shortage of MCAT prep resources out there, but I think that instead of focusing on volume of resources used, you should focus on mastering the ones you commit to early on.
- Be honest with yourself about your progress. In order to do this, you have to keep track of your performance closely. Use a spreadsheet or a notebook as a log. When you answer a question incorrectly, write out why you think you got it wrong, so that you can keep track of what exactly you’re doing wrong (e.g. picking an answer choice without reading it entirely, misunderstanding a concept, forgetting an equation, etc.) When you encounter a similar question type or topic in the future, you’ll be able to clearly gauge your improvement and/or point out a trend. This strategy allows you to diagnose your weaknesses throughout your prep period and spend time on them rather than on concepts you’ve already mastered. Soon enough, you’ll see an upward trend in your FL scores.
Originally published at https://thepostbac.com on July 13, 2020.
