Khan Academy Bio/Biochem Scores --> MCAT Bio/Biochem Scores?

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aalamruad

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Anyone have info about what different percentages of questions right on the KA bio passages translate to on the MCAT? i.e. can you extrapolate that if you're getting about 80% of the questions right on the KA passages, you'll be looking at ~125 on the Bio/Biochem section of the MCAT (just used random numbers as an example)?

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Any evidence of that? I'm not necessarily doubting you, but if KA is endorsed by AAMC, it seems surprising that there would be no correlation of scores at all, no?
Okay when I say no correlation I don't mean like literally zero but what i'm saying is that its unpredictable. Here's why. There are so many topics on the MCAT and each Khan passage only covers one topic. In addition each passage only has five questions, whereas a normal C/P passage can be even longer (up to 7). In addition you cannot go back and forth between questions before submitting answers unlike the real thing. The formatting is not like the real thing so that's why I say it is not predictive. You can't just keep track of how many you got right and then correlate it to success on the real thing.

What I do think is correlated to success on the real thing is doing khan passages. The more you do, the higher your score improves. Personally I was always pretty good at C/P type stuff (i'm a math person) but the bio section was killing me on practice tests. I ended up doing over 100 khan bio passages and went from average bio scores on practice tests (I once got 54% correct on an ek exam and a 123 on a tpr exam) to getting a 130 on the bio section on the real thing. So don't worry about how many you get right in khan, worry about how many you do, and how much in detail you go over your mistakes. Does that answer your question?
 
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Okay when I say no correlation I don't mean like literally zero but what i'm saying is that its unpredictable. Here's why. There are so many topics on the MCAT and each Khan passage only covers one topic. In addition each passage only has five questions, whereas a normal C/P passage can be even longer (up to 7). In addition you cannot go back and forth between questions before submitting answers unlike the real thing. The formatting is not like the real thing so that's why I say it is not predictive. You can't just keep track of how many you got right and then correlate it to success on the real thing.

What I do think is correlated to success on the real thing is doing khan passages. The more you do, the higher your score improves. Personally I was always pretty good at C/P type stuff (i'm a math person) but the bio section was killing me on practice tests. I ended up doing over 100 khan bio passages and went from average bio scores on practice tests (I once got 54% correct on an ek exam and a 123 on a tpr exam) to getting a 130 on the bio section on the real thing. So don't worry about how many you get right in khan, worry about how many you do, and how much in detail you go over your mistakes. Does that answer your question?
Yeah that makes perfect sense, thanks for the explanation. And congrats on that improvement in bio!
 
I would say that Khan is a good resource to get your feet wet. Once you finish those, you can move on to the more challenging passages from Kaplan, TPR, and BR.
 
I would say that Khan is a good resource to get your feet wet. Once you finish those, you can move on to the more challenging passages from Kaplan, TPR, and BR.
Out of curiosity, how would you say the KA passages differ from Kaplan/TPR/BR/etc. in terms of difficulty as well as other factors? Are they representative at all of the prep company passages, or fundamentally different?
 
Out of curiosity, how would you say the KA passages differ from Kaplan/TPR/BR/etc. in terms of difficulty as well as other factors? Are they representative at all of the prep company passages, or fundamentally different?

I was enrolled in a Kaplan course and their passages were pretty difficult. Same goes with TPRH science workbook and TBR. They were a lot more detailed than Khan and the actual MCAT, which is good I guess. You'll be a lot more confident taking the test after prepping with harder material.

But If you're looking for something that closely resembles the MCAT, I'd go with EK's FLs and the AAMC questions packs + FL.
 
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But If you're looking for something that closely resembles the MCAT, I'd go with EK's FLs and the AAMC questions packs + FL.

AAMC QPacks are not representative of the exam and the FLs are on the easy end of the spectrum. Section Bank is your best resource.
 
@aldol16 a bit off topic, but did you feel that AAMC CARS QPacks were also not representative of the exam? Asking because the section bank doesn't include CARS. Thanks as always :)
 
@aldol16 a bit off topic, but did you feel that AAMC CARS QPacks were also not representative of the exam? Asking because the section bank doesn't include CARS. Thanks as always :)

For CARS, the QPacks are okay, but again, on the easier end of the spectrum. For all other sections, the QPacks were much easier.
 
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