MCAT Study System

Resources
• Register TPR live on-line Course ($1,799, less $200 Google coupon?, Good for # sittings?): 1-877-877-6687: http://www.princetonreview.com/mcat-liveonline.aspx
o This is at least a 6 hour per day commitment, sometimes up to 9 hours (m-f, s,s?)
• (If on-line course, do I still need?) TPR's Hyperlearning books from Princeton Review Actual Course ($1,999) (clean, not marked, non smoker)
• (TPR on-line course includes?) AAMC Actual Tests: Full Length (FL) #3-5 and 7-11 (AAMC #6 is not available at the moment): http://www.e-mcat.com/starttest.aspx?cmd=displayfile&file=buy
• MCAT 3 month Study Calendar: http://studentdoctor.net/reference-materials/3-month-mcat-study-schedule/
• Register SDN (RRAN4U, rudy123) and request a TPR Course actual study schedule from a current student
• Get complete EK 1001 series.
• Take AAMC free test under timed conditions for self-diagnostic
• Topic Outline of each science subject for Hat Trick: https://www.aamc.org/students/applying/mcat/preparing/
• Use AAMC Topic Outline to determine areas of weakness
• Lastly, sign up for your MCAT as soon as possible. Seats fill up months in advance, & get all the above 1-2 months ahead of schedule
• Begin studying ExamKracker 1-2 hours per day by topic for 6 weeks, prior to TPR on-line class?

Notes:
- Do NOT retake old practice material
-The key to MCAT success is not content review, it's taking tons of timed practice passages and thoroughly reviewing those passages.
- Thoroughly review ALL of your practice problems. Review your problems the day AFTER you take them. Don't even look at the answers until then. If there’s a break day, review your problems on the day after your break.
- Remember to round like crazy for any math problem
- Always use process of elimination with your answer choices
- Before you begin this schedule, count the number of verbal practice passages (101 from EK + however many in the TPR Hyperlearning Verbal Workbook). Divide the number of passages by 70 (total days - the number of break days AND FL days). That number is the number of verbal passages you should be taking per day. I’m hoping that number breaks down to at least 3 passages per day. Ideally, you should take 4-5 verbal passages per assigned day. You do NOT take verbal passages on break days OR FL days.
- If you don’t want to get the EK 1001 series, spread out the second 1/3 of BR practice passages over 2 days. Again, I recommend you get the EK 1001 books that are listed.
- If your practice test score is not within your target range after 4 tests, you should consider delaying. If you delay, go over your weaknesses again and complete an in-depth analysis of what went wrong.
- If you have enough money, you could adjust the schedule to fit in more practice tests. I didn’t include that many to keep the cost down.
- If your test is in the morning and you're not a morning person, start getting used to waking up early when you start taking practice tests.
- Try to practice under as realistic as possible conditions when you take your practice tests. In other words: wake up early enough to be able to drive to your center; eat a meal you would eat before a test; follow the proper timing; and if you're really into it, you could even drive around for about the same time it would take you to get to your test center.

General Guidelines for Reviewing:
- Go over EVERY question. Both the ones you got right and the ones you got wrong.
- Reviewing should take 2-3 times longer than taking the timed practice problems.
- If your tests are fluctuating, it is due to the different topics on the various tests. In other words, you have some glaring weaknesses that when targeted, nail you, badly. You have to find out what those weaknesses are because they are evident by your scores. Do NOT dismiss any wrong answer as a "stupid mistake." You made that error for a reason. Go over your tests again.
- You might want to consider making a log for all of your post test results where you work through the questions below. Doing so, you'll be able to easily notice trends.

Some things to go over when reviewing:
1. Why did you get the question wrong? Why did you get the question right?
2. What question and passage types get you?
3. How is your mindset when facing a particular passage?
4. Are you stressed for time?
5. Where are your mistakes happening the most? Are they front loaded? Are they at the end? All over?
6. What was your thought process for both the questions you got right and the ones you got wrong?
7. For verbal, what was the author's mindset and main idea?
8. Did you eliminate all of the answer choices you could from first glance?
ex. You know an answer should be a positive number so you cross out all of the negative number answer choices.
9. What content areas are you weak in?
10. Why are the wrong answers wrong and the right answer right?
11. How can you improve so you don't make the same mistake again?

Timing:
- ALWAYS complete your practice problems under TIMED conditions
- For BR passages: 6-7 minutes per passage, work towards 6 minutes
- For the EK 30-minute exams….well 30 minutes
- EK 1001, except Bio series: 30 seconds to 1 minute per question
- EK Verbal 101/TPR Verbal: 6-7 minutes per passage, work towards 6 minutes
- AAMC FLs: Use their timing

Why do you review previous days passages instead of reviewing the same day?
There are a couple reasons why I advise reviewing passages the day after. First, it helps to go over the material again, especially in regards to the sciences. Secondly, directly after you take a set of practice problems, you aren't in the best mind frame to then analyze said problems. Your mind is too focused on what you completed and is unable to grasp the big picture. You need that day for your thoughts to settle in order to approach the analysis with the right mindset. It's similar to how you may make a decision one day. Then the next day, you realize that it wasn't the best choice. Yet, on the day you made your choice, you would have probably found justification for it rather than actually analyzing its pros and cons. Another example would be with proof-reading your own papers. Right after you write your paper, when you proof-read it, you'll probably miss plenty of mistakes. However, checking it the next day allows you to approach the paper with a clear mind and find more mistakes.

Hat Trick:
Get a hat and write every single MCAT PS and BS topic onto a piece of paper. Then, when you're ready to practice PS, put all the PS topics into the hat. Draw two or three pieces of paper and connect the topics together. In addition to connecting them, come up with what a passage might look like and what kind of questions you might get. If you can't do this, go back and review each of the three sections. Rinse and repeat.

The hat trick days are important because they aid you in synthesizing the various topics together. On the MCAT, you utilize this skill for every passage because MCAT passages combine topics. Furthermore, you may also discover content weaknesses that you will need to go over.

For the hat trick, how specific are the topics you write down supposed to be? For example, is it better to write "electron structure," or go more in-depth and write each of the numbered topics (ie. orbital structure, ground state, etc)?

It's really up to you and how you want to utilize the Hat Trick. A good starting point would be writing down all of the bolded topics. Then, when you're doing the Hat Trick, you should think about each topic more in-depth. Remember, you're trying to think up an MCAT style passage. In other words, the passage won't be simple; it will involve some of the complexities of each topic.

Here's a rough example using Distillation, Mendelian Genetics, and Lipids:
You are studying a Mendelian inherited recessive genetic defect of a lipid receptor. A defect in this receptor prevents the uptake lipids in the body and can cause several negative effects, such as, atherosclerosis due to fat build-up in arterial walls.

To test for the concentration of lipids in a patient's blood, you design a distillation experiment.
1. Given a couple where the male is Ll and the female is ll, what is the chance the child will have the defect?
2. What kind of solvent should you use to test the concentration of lipids?
3. What type patient would have the highest boiling point elevation?
4. If the trait exhibited incomplete dominance, which patient is likely to be Ll? Boiling point information here.
5. Which cell component requires lipids?

My verbal strategy...(I bombed on the real thing comparatively to my practices. I avged 12-15 on practices, scored a 12 on my diagnostic, but an 11 on the real thing. That being said, I'm still ecstatic!)

1) Practice under harsher timed conditions than you will encounter on the test. You will have about 8.5 mins for every verbal passage. Get a stop watch and a verbal workbook, and practice finishing every passage in 6.5 mins. When I started doing this, two things happened: 1)Even though I was using less time, my scores did not decrease. They stayed the same. 2) When I became really good at answering the passages quickly, I found that I had time to refer back to the passage on every question. Now, since I can read the passages much more effectively (meaning faster) when I see a question that I'm not sure of, I have time to go back and quickly re-read the 3-4 sentences that pertain to the question. At this point, my scores started to increase.

2) Attack every single paragraph. Read very quickly, but read very actively. Don't try and go too slowly to remember every detail, this will kill you. What you should do is Gather themain idea of every paragraph, and make sure you're always thinking about the POINT of the passage. Eventually, when you've done enough verbal practice, gathering the idea of a section or paragraph will come very naturally. As a byproduct, you will start to gain a sense of the types of details that are important to remember, and you will begin to remember them automatically.

3) When doing the read-through, DO NOT re-read a sentence if you think you weren't paying attention. Try this on any reading material: Try reading very actively, but force yourself not to re-read sentences you just read or to go back on the first read through. If you are actively reading, its amazing how much you retain without having to re-read. Your brain often tricks you into thinking that you didn't understand something, when in fact you did.

4) You should be categorizing the paragraphs in your head. Remember that the reading material on the verbal section is always written so that the information is organized in some logical way. The AAMC specifically picks passages that are not haphazardly organized and written. "Categorizing" means that you should be thinking about the general subject of each paragraph so that you know where in the passage to look for information when you need to refer back as you answer the questions. It does not mean stopping and summarizing every paragraph in your head as you read. This way you don't waste time re-reading large sections of the passage (or the whole passage!) to find helpful information when you do need to refer back. Instead, your categorical map of the paragraphs will give you a general idea of where that information should be located. This will save you important time when you reach one of those questions that you don't know right off the bat. Lastly, the categorical map you create as you are doing your first read through should be in your head. This means you are really just making mental notes that point you in the right direction, and not summarizing.

5) Answer every question in order, do not skip questions. I think that this particular point works really well because often the questions themselves are ALOT of reading! If you read a question, decide that its too hard and skip to the next, you'll then have to come back and re-read the question on your second attempt thereby wasting time! Make a mental note of and use the CBT's "mark" function on the questions that are iffy so that when you do go back and review all of your answer, you know which questions you should focus more time on.

6) Be aware of the different question types on the verbal section. The princeton review book has a list of these, and I think the Kaplan one does as well. In addition, when you are reviewing your practice exams you should make your own list of what you think the different question types are. As to HOW to answer every question type; This is one of the major areas where practice comes into it. As you get better, you'll begin to realize the types of things that look like 'correct' answers, and you get a feel for the types of things that the examiner is looking for. Check out the "process of elimination" section (number 8 in this post).

7) Do heavy post-game analysis. You must, must, must go back over your verbal questions and ensure that your thought process was correct for the questions that you got right. Figuring out what exactly you were thinking when you answered a question incorrectly is absolutely essential. That way, when you find yourself thinking in a similar way on a future exam, you might stop and think twice about your answer. Do not ever say, "Oh I totally should have gotten that question! It's easy!" If you missed a question, you missed it for a reason. Instead of passing it off as a "stupid mistake" make sure you understand exactly why you made that mistake, and what you were thinking when you made it. Then, you should try and figure which types of questions you are most often missing and analyze your thought process to see what wrong thought caused you to pick a wrong answer. Then, be aware, and fix that thought process.

8) Learn to use process of elimination (POE). There are a few tricks you can use to POE the hell out of some verbal questions.
- Extreme sounding answers are almost always wrong. Exception: If the passage itself sounds extreme. You should still make sure that your answer choice fits with the logic of the question and the passage itself. For instance, the question could ask, "Which of the following is NOT representative of the author's stance of issue X". In these types of questions, the extreme answer might be right.

- In questions that ask you to describe the 'mood' of the author, or any question with 'one word' answer choices, answers that are similar or say the same thing are almost always both wrong. Check and see if you picked an answer that sounds very similar to another one, and make sure you know exactly why you chose that answer. The MCAT will never be cut and dry, so just make sure your logic about an answer choice is clear.
- Watch out answer choices with identical or similar vocabulary to the passage. A very common trick is that often words that were used in the passage will be transplanted into an answer choice with either: 1) a cause and effect relationship reversed so that it is wrong, 2) a fact from the passage taken out of context, 3) a hypothesis that is mis-stated, 4) a slight twisting of the author's logic, 5) an incorrect detail has been inserted into the answer choice. Watch out for these, and when you see an answer choice with alot of identical words to the passage, be very sure to dissect it so that you understand its meaning. As you practice more and more, you'll begin to find other curious aspects of answer choices and question stems that stick out at you.

9) PRACTICE!!!
No seriously, practice. Developing an MCAT intuition is like developing a muscle. You can't cram for it, and you can't practice it "sometimes" while expecting major gains. You have to practice, consistently, repeatedly, and often.

10) Closing Note
This is my entire strategy. What worked for me may not work for you, but it's worth a shot! If something different than what I've posted here works for you, then use it! (and more importantly, come back to The Studentdoctor Network and tell us about it!). I picked up a princeton review verbal workbook (I think you can only get them from the class) and I did two passages every 1-2 days starting at about 3 months before my MCAT. Toward the end of my practice test runs I was consistently getting 13s and 14s in verbal on the AAMCs. This section is doable guys. Just make sure you are practicing properly and meticulously reviewing your answers! Just doing passages isn't going to give you exponential gains in performance. You have to practice and review the right way.

You should try for the 4 month modification of this schedule which I will post later on. Stretching this schedule longer then that significantly reduces its effectiveness. At that point, you need a completely different type of schedule, one more suited for 5-6 months. Any studying done prior to 6 months before your test date is pointless (except for reading). Lastly, it's still a horrible idea to study for the MCAT while taking a heavy courseload.

I took TPR at night over a spring semester, during which I took a couple of tests to get warmed up. Once summer started I studied 10 hours a day 5 - 6 days a week. Wake up at 8, 2 hours on, 1 hour break and repeat 5 times. Each 2 hour block was devoted to a different section of the test. I used my TPR schedule to go through the material. I did a full practice test every Friday and spend Saturday doing test analysis. I never studied on Sunday to let my mind relax. During the last two weeks I modified the schedule and took practice tests every 3 days. This schedule kept me from going nuts during the 7 weeks before I took the test.

Verbal Guide
First) Try doing a passage without being timed. Read, re-read, and re-read the passage again if you need to. Write notes. Look for keywords that let you know what the authors opinion, purpose, and tone of voice is. Then spend as much time as you want on the questions. Do not mark a question unless you are 100% sure it is right. Go back to the passage and identify what in the passage makes this question correct. Finish 1-2 passages in this fashion.

Second) Spend a lot of time going over the answers. Do not just go, "oh ya" and move on. Truly identify why you got this wrong, if you got it wrong. Do you understand why it is correct? Then critique if you would be able to get this right after a week.

Third) After practicing 2 days on passages un-timed but pacing yourself so you finish within 12-15 mins per passage, try timing yourself for 8.5mins or less per passage. Are you making more mistakes? Are you spending more time on the reading or on the questions (it should be approximately equal depending on the passage difficulty)? This will allow you to key into where your biggest problem is.

Fourth) By the end of the week, re-do the first passage I told you to do un-time and try to do it under a timed condition. Are you still making the same mistakes? If so, did you review it properly? Keep a log of what passages get you the most and which are getting you the least.

Fifth) In the beginning, I recommend you do the passage types that really bug you. If you hate philosophy, do only philosophy passages for 5 days straight... if its art do that. Then after you are conformable with reading those passages, you may move on practices other passages. As a helpful hint, milk your strengths as much as possible since the test is not bias where the correct answers come from (a point is a point).

Sixth) Try different strategies and find what is best for you. Try mapping, try reading question first then attacking the passage. Try finishing the passage within 7 mins or 7.5 mins. Make sure you find what works best for you.

Map Passages
Your map should help you to pick out which paragraph to refer back to and the question/answer will have key words for you to find the sentence to answer your questions. You need to know what your skimming as in "what am I missing?" so you know to look 'here' if they ask a question pertaining to it. Think of it this way. Every single answer to a question is in the passage, so why not use it? If you have time, I would suggest that you practice mapping because it takes time to get use to. At first, it will be hard to use efficient words and not take up too much time, but eventually you'll get the hang of it.

Here are some tips:
1) Only write a FEW words AFTER each paragraph.
2) Don't take notes WHILE reading.. if you see something that you really think is important HIGHLIGHT it--mapping is to give you an idea of what is what in the passage
3) If the questions are based on the passage, nearly every answer will be in the passage.
4) Try practicing a few times without timing yourself and get accustomed in finding the answer.
5) I highlight only names, dates, and seemingly important texts and that's it (too much highlights distracts me)
6) Each paragraph I only map the main purpose of it (why does the author include this paragraph and not leave it out?)
7) Also a VERY IMPORTANT clue to look for is... Does the author have an opinion or not? If so, more than likely you will have a question about it. In the end write the authors tone of voice (i.e. opinionated or not).

“SPAM” Map
Main point
Attitude of author
Pupose (of each passage)
Support

MCAT STUDY TIPS
1. Wake up early and study
2. Exercise daily
3. Plan 4 mth schedule (after BC finals (Dec) – April)
• Draw a map of the body systems in the human body... start with what happens when food enters your mouth.. or what happens when air enters your nose? If you do this over and over (write it down once and practice recall), physiology will make a lot more sense to you. how does this affect the heart? stomach? lungs? etc..
• Try and relate this to fluid flow in physics, for example. As one of my engineering friends told me, imagine the body as a circuit with blood being the current.
• Know which systems normally "go together"... for ex: Nervous and Endocrine system... at times, if you don't know what a question is talking about, knowing which "things" go together can be a big help.
4. Look at the AAMC topics list and identify the topics you had difficulty with and study those mainly
5. Also write stuff like, what happens if I add a resistor in parallel to a circuit? How is current affected... just knowing stuff like this like the back of your hand will save unnecessary time. The first time I had circuit questions, I had to draw 2 resistors in parallel to check if my thinking was right.
6. I forced myself to check if every Chemical equation I saw was balanced.
7. Keep a log of the types of questions on each exam you took ..see patterns
8. Study all of the material front to back and upside down...and not just the information, but also the concepts, how the concepts interrelate to each other, and how to grasp 'the big picture'. I learned cold ever piece of information in both the kaplan and princeton books, the AAMC concept list, and on all the practice exams I did (about 20)...but this was only the first half of my test preparation. The rest of my preparation went into learning how to beat the exam itself. Learning how to eliminate incorrect answers, devising a system to finish problems at breakneck speed without doing almost ANY calculations, and using almost no paper. I went through all of my AAMC practice exams and realized that there are certain types of problems that come back again and again, and again. If you see this, you begin to see that AAMC also makes their answer choices in a certain way. Thus, on some problems even if you don't have a good grasp on the material, you can eliminate answers to get the problem right. For instance, on my real MCAT there was a question that had some organic macromolecule with a bunch of acetyl-ester groups. The question asked something that sounded really complicated and finished with, 'Which of the Acteyl groups, either A, B, C, or D would be cleaved?' I had NO IDEA what they were talking about. But because I knew that the MCAT likes to test about carbonyl carbon electrophilicity, I realized that the answer was probably the acetyl groups that were all the same and had the most positive carbonyl group. I'm sure that I got that question right. And it wasn't because I knew the material, it's because I spent alot of hours figuring out the system used by the MCAT test makers; how the exam is structured, how AAMC formulates questions, and the methods that AAMC uses to trick students. It really didn't have much to do with 'intelligence' (whatever that is!).
9. Other people have hinted at this, especially with the mention of engineering students doing well on this test. The MCAT does require a broad knowledge base, but just knowing facts will not get you very far. Once you've read up about a particular concept, be it an organ system, circuits, or chemical synthesis, try and ask yourself conceptual questions with qualitative answers. For example, suppose you've just studied electrical circuits. Consider a circuit with a battery followed by a light bulb followed by a resistor (i.e. the resistor is in series with the light bulb). Ask yourself questions like "what happens to the bulb's brightness if I increase the value of the resistor?" Answer: the brightness decreases because the net current through the circuit has decreased. What if you add an identical resistor in parallel with the first one, but still in series with the bulb? The brightness of the bulb increases because the overall resistance of the circuit has decreased. This sort of qualitative understanding can get you a long way--you aren't allowed a calculator on the MCAT and there is a reason for that. Everything can be done using either estimation or using your qualitative estimate to strike out every other option. At an absolute minimum, you can strike out some answers so that guessing becomes more profitable. As another example, learn to do dimensional analysis and know your SI units. If you are told to calculate the power dissipated by some process and there are answers in Joules, you can strike them out without thinking since you want something in terms of Watts. You should know, given an equation with a single unknown, how to figure out what the units of the unknown must be if you know the units of every other value.
10. Writing - TPR gave us a list of the categories of topics, eg. Government, Ethics, Justic, etc. I started a notebook of examples for each topic. I got a trial subscription to The Economist and Time (free 6 mths with TPR course) and read it for example ideas. If I found one relevant to a past essay prompt or topic, I would search the details on the internet. Wikipedia became my god. I found a good strategy for the writing sample was to think of your examples for thesis and antithesis first, then looking for the difference between those examples (and voila, a synthesis). The other way would be to think of the differences first, then find examples to fit it. But this was harder. In the August MCAT, I got extremely lucky with my prompts and didn't blank on the essays at all (I would've if I had gotten something related to politics or justice...boo!). I ended up using examples I mostly knew off the top of my head already and didn't really need my example book! And just to show that you don't need spectacular examples: I talked about Sex and the City on my first essay. It's all about how you say it, not what you say!