I have the Berkeley Review books for General Chemistry, Physics, and Organic Chemistry.
I also have the Exam Krackers books for Verbal Reasoning and Biology.
I plan to take the new MCAT in April 2016, but I'm concerned that my books are obsolete enough to the point where I need to buy extra books.
You have a great starting point for your books. Granted, I have a slight bias here, but I have been doing this for a long time and have seen a few MCAT changes. I work for a company that only does MCAT, so the latest changes to the MCAT have been a topic of daily discussion for the last five years, especially since April. After all of the hype and all of the hysteria entering April, it is quite clear that the exam has not changed that much (yet). The periodic table, to be best of my knowledge, has the same elements it had one year ago. I believe, although I don't have a citation to support this, that gravity is still 9.8 m/s2 like it was last year. The topics have changed a little, with the removal of some subjects from physics, general chemistry, and organic chem. But those topics hardly appeared on the MCAT to begin with.
The key things are that they still (1) have four choices per question, (2) still mix topics together in passages, (3) have a good number of passages based on experiments, and (4) reward thinking over memorization. Those facts have not changed. So the books that had the best test strategies a year ago and mixed subjects together well, and demanded that you think on the majority of their questions are still going to be your best option. It's human nature that with the changes, people will feel better if it looks like their books have changed, but this has truly become a scenario where people are judging a book by its cover. Our students have been doing very well so far on the new exam, despite our older covers. The way they practice with questions is a perfect fit for the new exam.
I appreciate that people still recognize our passages as being the best resource for practicing, but the text is pretty good too. There are some invaluable shortcuts in the text that if you skip the reading you skip some techniques that could save you up to five minutes on an average exam. There are new versions of the books you mentioned coming out soon (starting with organic chemistry later this month). But the people who used the
old books have been getting some great scores. If you stay with those books and cross off the topics that are no longer tested, you'll do fine.
My main question is, are these books alone good enough for the new MCAT? If not, what else should I buy? I can't imagine the chem/bio/phys/ochem problems changing very much, so I'm hoping that my current books are good enough for those subjects. I also wonder if I need to get prep material for the new subjects like psychology, biochemistry, etc.
Thanks in advance.
You nailed it right there. You need a more in-depth biochemistry review and need to get your knowledge base of classical psychology and sociology theories and experiments down. For biochemistry, you need to start with amino acids and proteins and build through pathways and kinetics. You need to leave no stone unturned. Our new organic chemistry book 2 covers the fundamentals really well and our new biology 2 book covers the details really well. The
old organic chemistry book 2 was already going this way, so if your current BR books are recent enough, then your nitrogens chapter has many of the amino acids pearls of insight that have been critical to the current exam. Many of the things people have been posting frantically about in amino acids threads are in that chapter already. That should be your starting point, and then move on from there to whatever biochemistry source fits your learning style. For psychology and sociology, there are several books floating around and there seems to be no consensus yet. Our book is due out this month. The students who have used it, along with the SDN home studiers who got it recently, have loved the passages and felt it was very well written. Right now it is essential that you memorize a large volume of jargon and ideologies.
I would probably not use TBR for GChem, and Physics... The passages in TBR is another story though. The passages in the TBR books are worth it alone. TBR for bio/biochem is recommended if you really want to know your content.
We appreciate the endorsement. But I'd like to elaborate, and hope this doesn't go the wrong way. I completely believe (from years of experience) that the passages and questions are excellent (the best you'll find) at preparing students for how to think on the MCAT. This seems to be a very common opinion at SDN as well. But to do well on some of those questions (to master the shortcuts and understand where they are coming from), you need to work through the text (especially the sample questions in the text).
Without having sat and studied for the exam or having taken the MCAT, it is hard to see just how helpful that combination is. Most people who suggest skipping our text, have actually not worked through our books. From what I gather, that's true for you as well. What I'd suggest is that when you take your biochemistry class in college, use the amino acids section in our organic chemistry book 2 simultaneously. There are tricks in there that will make some challenging topics incredibly easy. This summer we had several students taking biochemistry in summer school while studying for the MCAT, so we scheduled our biochemistry lectures right before their midterm and their final. Every last one of them did perfect on the amino acid sections of their midterm and final. If you work through the sixteen pages in organic 2, then you'll see just how powerful the techniques are.
Good luck in your studies and ongoing pathway to medical school.
