Studying for the MCAT

This is probably the question I get asked most often from pre-med students and for a good reason too. The MCAT covers material across biology, biochemistry, chemistry, physics, psychology, sociology, and verbal reasoning and it's always a bit daunting thinking about how to review it all and do test prep on top of that. By giving yourself enough time to learn and understand the material and most importantly, to get comfortable with the testing format, you'll be good to go!

Where to Start:

Start by thinking about your individual learning style.

Do you prefer a structured program that provides you with a schedule to keep you on track or to kick start your studying? If yes, explore taking a MCAT prep course through which you'll be able to stay on top of content review and receive additional review materials. There are so many different courses out there with Kaplan, Princeton Review, Examkrackers, and Next Step being the more popular choices among students.

Do you prefer a self-structured study schedule to prep for the test? A simple google search for MCAT study schedules will load tons of hits from students who have detailed their week by week breakdown of the material covered and practice questions attempted. Do some reading and generate a list of helpful tips and points that resonate with your personal study style. You can then synthesize your own study schedule or even integrate certain tasks into a pre-existing one and modify it as needed.

Study Effectively:

It's tempting to cram as much as you can into every prep day when planning your schedule, but make sure you allot enough time to really understand the concepts and not just skim over topics thinking you may know them well already from studying for your classes. The best measure of how well you have mastered the material is doing practice passages and questions. It's really important to get started with doing practice questions as early as you can because it gives you the best feel for the style of the questions on the exam. I suggest taking a practice section or even doing a few passages or sections from a question bank a few times each week even while doing content review to start getting a feel for the testing format.

As you get closer to your exam date, schedule days to take full-length practice tests in the same way you would at any testing center. Replicating the testing conditions as well as you can at home by starting in the morning, taking breaks as structured in the exam, timing your sections, having one sheet of scrap paper and a pen, using a desktop or laptop connected to a mouse, and completing the test in a distraction-free environment helps to ease nerves on the day of the exam and puts you into testing mode from day 1. It also helps you build stamina because let's be honest...this is a LONG exam.

Study Materials and Practice Exams:

If you ask 10 medical students what materials they used to prep for the MCAT, you will probably get 10 different answers since everyone chooses their prep books based on what fits their study style best. For prep material, I personally found the Next Step series of books and question banks to be the most helpful for my exam prep since I thought they did a great job of presenting the material in a concise way while giving enough practice material to be able to apply the concepts I learned from content review. I encourage you to read reviews of test prep materials and even ask your friends and upperclassmen what they found to be the most helpful before deciding which set may be best for you.

When it comes to practice tests, it's important to use material from a variety of testing vendors to ensure that you don't get too comfortable with one particular style of testing. While all vendors claim to mimic the real MCAT, they still have slight differences in terms of difficulty of questions, length of passages, and range of topics covered. You want to be exposed to various practice tests so that when you take your actual exam, you've had experience dealing with different types of passages and stand-alone questions, giving you the best advantage to tackle similar questions on test day. Kaplan, Princeton Review, Examkrackers, and Next Step all have great full-length exams you can buy and use as practice sections or to simulate a mock exam.

AAMC also offers practice question banks and exams with more great questions for you to review the material with. As the test maker, their practice material is probably the closest you can get to simulating the exam you will take on test day. I highly recommend reserving the exams they offer as the final practice tests you will take, as they serve as a great measure for how you will do on the real exam +/- a few points.

Score Improvement: Are you reviewing your errors correctly?

Error analysis is one of the most important parts of exam prep. We may be making the same mistakes over and over again on certain types of questions without even realizing it, but taking the time to review why you are making these errors can help us be more aware of how to tackle similar questions moving forward. I found it helpful to keep a separate notebook just for this purpose and made separate tabs for each of the four sections on the exam.

Start by identifying why you might be making the error. Is it because you may not be as confident with the material you learned? Go back and review those specific sections or watch a video from Khan Academy or YouTube to brush up your knowledge about this topic. Review the explanation given for the question you got wrong and write down any key points you learned. This also includes any terms or concepts in the incorrect answer choices that you may not be familiar with because there's always a chance that it could show up in another question at a later time. Or maybe you haven't learned how to navigate a specific question stem? Again, review the explanation given for these types of questions and write down the patterns you recognize to help you figure out how to answer similar questions. Even writing down the questions themselves that seem to be good examples of this stem allows you to have them on hand for easy reference.

By critically analyzing any and all errors on question banks and practice exams, you can improve your score by several points. Going over these notes a few times every week and in the days leading up to your exam is also great review tool for content and question types.