MCAT Strategies

As an aside to the following information: I have received my MCAT scores a couple of days ago, and I can gladly say that the practice AAMC tests have a strong predicting accuracy.
-------------------------------------
Today's post will be mostly about the broad strategies of preparation for the MCAT.

As you probably know, two major components determine whether or not you make the cut for the interview. These are your GPA and your MCAT score. There are books written on how to study efficiently and every university will have an undergraduate advising office that would be more than happy to justify its existence by helping you out with your studying. Today, however, we are going to talk about the other component, the MCAT.

Needless to say, there is no person on earth that would like to re-take this test (except maybe the guys who teach prep courses, so they can claim numerous successes). Let alone the financial toll it will have on you, the psychological damage your neurons will sustain is irreversible. So how can you prepare for this horrendous test?


Well, let us examine carefully the various ways:

• Wishful thinking. This is by far the easiest one. Just close your eyes and repeat after me "I am God (Good?). I need not take MCAT. But if I do, I ace it. I will see magic aura around correct answers..." I must warn that you might need some mushrooms or other hallucinogenic drugs to sustain that kind of attitude for long periods of time. Needless to say, this might, just might hurt your health. Hey, I'm not a doctor, I can't know for sure.
• Prep course. If you have a spare couple of thousand and a weak character, this is the perfect option for you. For 2 months you will be intensively learning all the concepts of the MCAT, while enjoying the same school routine you are so used to by now: classes, tests, feedback... As for choices, there are more than a couple of them:
• Kaplan
• Princeton Review
• Prep101
• Others, ehm, not available in Canada
  I know people who have done Kaplan and Princeton. Just as you might expect, there is no better or worse. There are, for sure, proponents of one that will claim the other is downright awful, that it is aimed at achieving mediocre scores at the expense of quick improvement, etc. As it turns out, nobody will do the work for you. Evolution does not suddenly stop depending on natural selection just because you took X or Y, allele distribution is still calculated according to Hardy Weinberg, chiral molecules remain in the form of two optical isomers. My point is the AAMC tells you what they want here, here, here and finally here. The only true advantage I see to all these courses is the correction of your written samples. This, however, can still be done by your true friends, your classmates or even your teachers.
• Self Study. This is what I did. And this is what you should do.

Self studying requires discipline. Let me repeat that: self studying requires SELF DISCIPLINE. Once more? Ok, ok, you got it. Now apply it. You will definitely need it during your years in medical school, why not start now? Just like any commitment, more so in fact, self studying will require sacrifice. A lot of people tend to think that if they plan something out, it will happen. No doubt about it, you will need a plan, however, this is but a beginning. You will have to forgo some opportunities, some events you'd like to attend. Generally, that is what we do when we want to achieve great things. Enough about that.
What is the best way to prepare on your own? Only you know it. Though I would suggest the following minimal plan:

1. Make sure you have at least 2 months. If you don't, please do not hold me responsible if the following does not work. My plan requires a lot of time.
2. Take the free AAMC test. There are two important reasons for that. First of all, if you get a bad score, this will give you a tangible motivation to study hard, improve and increase the score. Jumping five points feels really good. If you do well, then you know you have a good background, now you can perfect it (who said 45 is impossible?). Secondly, you will get invaluable diagnostics and feedback about every topic, question and answer. There, your weak areas are highlighted in graphs, pie charts and statistics. [Please note: After having done AAMC practice tests 3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10 and the actual beast I can firmly assure you that test 3 is misleading in terms of the actual difficulty. Thus, treat your results with discretion. Test 3 by itself is a poor indicator of outcome, it is more like choosing a restaurant, as opposed to getting directions to a specific one]
3. Buy at least one general book, one verbal book and some problem based books for basic sciences. Yes, they all are necessary. I will not recommend books in this post, but I will have a later review of the books I used and how they helped me (update: here is the review).
4. Establish a strict timeframe to cover the books you have acquired in LESS time than you have left before your test. This is crucial. You will have unforeseen circumstances and will be late in your studying. Moreover, you will need roughly a week and a half before the actual MCAT for doing the practice tests. Unfortunately, you will have to do as many as you can afford, since they are the only thing close to the real one. That is not to say you can't do other ones. You can practice with them during your studying time, get aquatinted with the timing, question format, interaction with the software (that will be very close), just do NOT do them in the last week.
5. NEVER, NEVER, NEVER do any practice or problem with a calculator.
6. NEVER, NEVER, NEVER do any practice test or test section (it is ok for discrete problems) without timing yourself similarly to the MCAT guidelines.
7. Follow your schedule as much as you can.

Here is a sample plan that I started with:
83 days
2 months 22 days
11 weeks
Book X - that many pages (so many/week)
Book Y - that many passages (so many/week)
Book A,B,C - so many problems each (so many/week)
Written topics - roughly 300 (so many/week)

Week	Pages (book X)	Passages	Problems	Written	Practice test
1					X
2					X
3					X
4					X
5					X
6					X
7					X
8					X
9					X
10					X
11
12

In the next posts, I will try to list some of the resources, free and commercial, that have been invaluable. Stay tuned...