PHD_2007 said:
Hey all,
I am a bit nervous too
Diag 16
FL#1 25
FL #6 25
FL #7 24
FL # 9 25
FL # 2 27
Can some one help me to get into the 30's? My goal is a 35 and I'm working my butt off PS is what's really holding me down that 27 on FL #2 consisted of 7, 10, 10. We have Full length #3 on Saturday and prayfully I can hit 30. Tiny Dancer can you give me some pointers too?
Thanks for your confidence in me, PHD2007, but I'm not sure I'm the best person to turn to... after all I'm in the same boat you are in!
Congrats on getting 10s on VR and BS, those are really solid scores.
As far as the PS, Tao gave some really great advice. If you've got the time, doing what he did would be a great way to review and drill in most of the important concepts. As much as I'd like to be able to do that, I think a lot of us are under a lot of time pressures what with MCAT stuff, school, work, and trying to squeeze some fun in here and there, so for me it's not really feasible.
So for the PS, if you're finding that you don't know the equations to help answer the questions, then I'd suggest just looking over Kaplan's formula sheet, just to make sure you're familiar with them. But even more important than that, is when you are looking through the review notes and stuff, you don't have to memorize all the formulas! Just look at the relationships between variables, it really helps a lot to understand how things relate conceptually, like when things are proportional or inversely proportional or whatever.
Usually you can derive a bunch of equations just by knowing a couple. And if you can't remember the relationships when you're taking a test - look at the units! I find that if I'm not sure, a lot of times I can figure out how to get the answer by looking at the units of what they give you and the units of the constants (of course this gets thrown off if there's a 1/2 or something's squared in the formula, but it's a great place to start if you don't know the formula off the top of your head).
Also, I think it would help to go over your past FL's, if you haven't already done so. I haven't been able to motivate myself to go over the ones I got right on FL's 1 and 2 (I keep telling myself, "hey, I got them right for a reason, right?" when I realize that there's a good chance I had guessed on it!) I haven't been able to spend a lot of time in going over them, but I do think it helps even when I just look at the question, what I put, the work I wrote around it, and then read Kaplan's answer explanation. It's hard to be motivated to do it, because it's easy to say, oh well this question was passage-specific so going over it won't help me on future tests, but you never know when a similar thing will pop up again. I run into that mindset a lot, so I end up just glancing at the test and skimming over the explanation, but I do think even doing that much helps.
Hope that helped, sorry I don't have much to offer, but maybe someone out there can help us both out!
(Also: A word of advice when you take FL3- don't get discouraged by the PS. Concentrate and watch your time! It's my humble opinion that it was harder than the 1st two. For FL's 1 and 2, I finished PS with extra time, but didn't even get close to finishing FL3. With 5 minutes left, I ended up having to fill in A's for like three entire passages worth of questions, but because of the curve, my PS score didn't go down. So don't feel bummed out if you don't leave feeling like you aced it, you probably did just as well as you had on the one before, or even better! -- A lot of people I talked to at the test had similar problems with not being able to finish, and that was definitely reflected in the curve. I think a lot of it had to do with me not focusing, I had just gotten my score report and saw that on every single section on FL2, if I had gotten one more question right, it would have bumped my score up a whole point so I kept thinking, every question counts, every question counts... which is NOT a very effective way to take an 85 minute section
