Study plan for 2015 MCAT?

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TheLeadSeed

TheLeadSeed

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Hey fellow sdn'ers,
I am currently an incoming Junior and plan on taking the 2015 MCAT during the late summer of 2015. I know most of us have heard of the SN2ed 3-month study plan for the old MCAT. Do you guys think there will be a new study plan posted by someone (doesn't have to be SN2ed). I'm not really sure how I'm supposed to study for it or what materials to buy, so a study plan like SN2ed's would be quite beneficial. Also, I don't plan on studying until May 2015, which is when I'll be finished all my pre-reqs for the new MCAT.

Thanks!
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I'm following the same timeline as yourself. Unfortunately, SN2ed's study plan is exhaustive and took a lot of time to put together. The thing is, people will have to be familiar with the test before they can make a study schedule. They would have to take the test first and use many different resources to determine what "works" and what doesn't. For you and I, there won't be many tests given by August-September of 2015, so I doubt anyone will have even had the opportunity to put something together such as SD2ed has done for the old MCAT. I don't predict that we will have such a resource at our disposal by the time we start studying. :(

But, who knows?
 
The formula of the SN2ed Plan, if you look at it carefully, is really simple.

1) Find high quality test material that explains each subject well without being too convoluted or too general.
2) Find high quality practice questions on each subject.
3) Do approximately one chapter (of one subject) a day while doing some practice questions. Rotate between subjects in a fixed order. For example, SN2ed does Physics, General Chemistry, Organic Chemistry, Biology, Repeat.
4) Break day once each week.
5) Reread/Review day once each week.
6) Once content is done, do full-length practice tests every three days, with the other two days being days spent on reviewing the full-lengths.
7) Incorporate "hat trick" once content review is done.
8) Do 2-3 verbal passages every day, except on break days.

You can adjust your weekly plans accordingly to your own personal tastes and give yourself more or less time on certain areas. I'm sure nobody follows SN2ed word for word. #1 and #2 will be the difficult part in assembling a new SN2ed Plan for the 2015 MCAT, but otherwise, it shouldn't be too difficult to make your own plan.
 
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Aerus said:
The formula of the SN2ed Plan, if you look at it carefully, is really simple.

1) Find high quality test material that explains each subject well without being too convoluted or too general.
2) Find high quality practice questions on each subject.
3) Do approximately one chapter (of one subject) a day while doing some practice questions. Rotate between subjects in a fixed order. For example, SN2ed does Physics, General Chemistry, Organic Chemistry, Biology, Repeat.
4) Break day once each week.
5) Reread/Review day once each week.
6) Once content is done, do full-length practice tests every three days, with the other two days being days spent on reviewing the full-lengths.
7) Incorporate "hat trick" once content review is done.
8) Do 2-3 verbal passages every day, except on break days.

You can adjust your weekly plans accordingly to your own personal tastes and give yourself more or less time on certain areas. I'm sure nobody follows SN2ed word for word. #1 and #2 will be the difficult part in assembling a new SN2ed Plan for the 2015 MCAT, but otherwise, it shouldn't be too difficult to make your own plan.
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J Senpai said:
I'm following the same timeline as yourself. Unfortunately, SN2ed's study plan is exhaustive and took a lot of time to put together. The thing is, people will have to be familiar with the test before they can make a study schedule. They would have to take the test first and use many different resources to determine what "works" and what doesn't. For you and I, there won't be many tests given by August-September of 2015, so I doubt anyone will have even had the opportunity to put something together such as SD2ed has done for the old MCAT. I don't predict that we will have such a resource at our disposal by the time we start studying. :(

But, who knows?
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Well it looks like the undergraduate class of 2016 are the guinea pigs to finding which test material is good for what subject and formulating a new study plan for future pre-meds! Oh well :cool:
 
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The Kaplan MCAT 2015 7 subject review is already out. I bought it and did some few reads to see how it's set up and it looks pretty detailed if you want to use that when the time comes. However since it is the only full 2015 book out right now there is nothing to really compare it to. Princeton Review 6 book version comes out later this month so when you start studying next year you can compare the reviews on both book versions to see which is best for you.
http://www.amazon.com/Kaplan-Comple...F8&qid=1405788267&sr=8-1&keywords=Kaplan+2015
http://www.amazon.com/Princeton-Rev...87&sr=8-1&keywords=princeton+review+mcat+2015
 
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J Senpai said:
I know, right? I guess I'll shoot for anything over ~500. Nice link btw.
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I don't know about that, 500 would correspond to today's 26 based on percentile.
 
Do you know where I could find a conversion chart or a chart that shows what score on the new MCAT would be for percentiles?
 
RWynd123 said:
Do you know where I could find a conversion chart or a chart that shows what score on the new MCAT would be for percentiles?
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They don't have a conversion chart, and likely they won't ever make one except for adcoms to see. They don't want students to compare a 500 on the new test to a 26 on the current test. But percentiles and confidence intervals will be given, so you can compare it that way.
 
TheLeadSeed said:
Well it looks like the undergraduate class of 2016 are the guinea pigs to finding which test material is good for what subject and formulating a new study plan for future pre-meds! Oh well :cool:
Click to expand...

Sorry to disappoint, but I'm not taking the new MCAT. :p
 
Yeah, the scoring on the new MCAT will be displayed to ADCOMs as a confidence interval, so not a single integer. For example, if I were to bomb the exam I'd probably receive a score of 479-482, to compensate for random chance.
 
they are not going to report a single number for the score?
 
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DocConk said:
Nope
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I don't know where you're getting this answer from, but here's a prototype score report from AAMC clearly showing the individual score as well as the confidence interval and percentile rank.

https://www.aamc.org/students/download/382754/data/mcat2015scorereportgraphic.pdf

Also, here's additional information on MCAT 2015 scoring guidelines and such, might be a good reference point once the MCAT is officially administered, so that they can work out the kinks.

https://www.aamc.org/students/applying/mcat/mcat2015/admins/scores/
 
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allenlchs said:
I don't know about that, 500 would correspond to today's 26 based on percentile.
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You see, that's the problem. I've heard that some adcoms are working on some ways to make sense of scores when the time comes.
 
The changes to the MCAT exam in 2015 preserve what works about the current exam, eliminate what isn’t working, and further enrich the MCAT exam by giving attention to the concepts tomorrow’s doctors will need.

  • Natural sciences sections of the MCAT2015 exam reflect recent changes in medical education.
  • Addition of the social and behavioral sciences section, Psychological, Social and Biological Foundations of Behavior, recognizes the importance of socio-cultural and behavioral determinants of health and health outcomes.
  • And the new Critical Analysis and Reasoning Skills section reflects the fact that medical schools want well-rounded applicants from a variety of backgrounds.

https://www.aamc.org/students/applying/mcat/mcat2015/
 
So to diverge the topic a tiny bit, I know critical analysis/reasoning skills (verbal) are just as important if not more important. I know they cause some difficulty for people, so my plan is to start doing things now that can improve those skills for not only the exam but for the future as well. What are some things one could do? Just read article/books/journals/anything that interests us? I've never been much of a reader.
 
TheLeadSeed said:
So to diverge the topic a tiny bit, I know critical analysis/reasoning skills (verbal) are just as important if not more important. I know they cause some difficulty for people, so my plan is to start doing things now that can improve those skills for not only the exam but for the future as well. What are some things one could do? Just read article/books/journals/anything that interests us? I've never been much of a reader.
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If you're talking about the verbal section, then it highly depends.

You do need some level of reading comprehension, but after that, there's a margin of subjectivity in how you approach the answers. So if you're aiming for around a 10 on verbal, read journals, articles, and books that focus on a variety of topics and see if you can make questions based on these readings using common verbal question stems. Getting a 10 is definitely doable, since in my opinion, that's the minimum score to get if you have a "great" grasp on basic reading comprehension.

If you're aiming for a 13-15, then it just takes a bunch of practice on passages and/or you've been reading dense philosophical works since the age of 10 and can extrapolate ideas from these dense readings quickly and without effort.

If you're talking about passages in general on the MCAT (all sections), I found it helpful to read scientific journals.
 
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What journals did you read? Did you just look up topics on pubmed or what? I think I have access to journals through a proxy on my school's library website, but I'm not sure.
Aerus said:
If you're talking about the verbal section, then it highly depends.

You do need some level of reading comprehension, but after that, there's a margin of subjectivity in how you approach the answers. So if you're aiming for around a 10 on verbal, read journals, articles, and books that focus on a variety of topics and see if you can make questions based on these readings using common verbal question stems. Getting a 10 is definitely doable, since in my opinion, that's the minimum score to get if you have a "great" grasp on basic reading comprehension.

If you're aiming for a 13-15, then it just takes a bunch of practice on passages and/or you've been reading dense philosophical works since the age of 10 and can extrapolate ideas from these dense readings quickly and without effort.

If you're talking about passages in general on the MCAT (all sections), I found it helpful to read scientific journals.
Click to expand...
 
EDIT: Accidentally hit post twice, oops.
 
Caffein3 said:
What journals did you read? Did you just look up topics on pubmed or what? I think I have access to journals through a proxy on my school's library website, but I'm not sure.
Click to expand...

I've mostly been reading the literature that pertains to the research that I do. You can definitely read other journals on pubmed, though.
 
Aerus said:
I've mostly been reading the literature that pertains to the research that I do. You can definitely read other journals on pubmed, though.
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What about Science Magazine, New England Journal of Medicine, or Journal of American Medical Association? Would those be beneficial, or would it be better to stick to some general literature like NY Times, New Yorker, LA Times, etc. to get a varied style of reading/topics?
 
Time Table said:
What about Science Magazine, New England Journal of Medicine, or Journal of American Medical Association? Would those be beneficial, or would it be better to stick to some general literature like NY Times, New Yorker, LA Times, etc. to get a varied style of reading/topics?
Click to expand...

Science literature has helped me a bit with the science passages. General literature would be helpful for verbal if you still need to improve reading comprehension.
 
I bought a subscription to The Economist. Worked tremendously and I scored a 10 on VR.

What also helped me was reading interesting articles out loud to my girlfriend. I made it a point to read slow enough so she could understand what was going on in the article, while at the same time, trying to comprehend what was going on. And then during test day, I would mouth the words from the passage and pretend I was doing the exact same thing, except in my mind. I don't know why but this technique is what brought me from an 8 -> 10.
 
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I'll probably modify the Sn2ed solo study schedule for the new MCAT and do that. I'm not really about taking classes. If it works well I'll probably post it on here in a similar "My 30+ post" fashion, although it'll be "My 510+ Post" or something like that.
 
I will be taking the MCAT 2015 the summer after next and have read quite a bit about how the score reporting will go.

In order to help ADCOMs make sense of the new system, they will include a percentile score for the first several rounds of testing. This will allow a determination of the relative weight of a point on the new vs old test. So your percentile is really what you should be worried about if you are taking the test in the next couple of years.

As far as material goes I am very concerned as well. There won't be many practice exams out for awhile and the review material is VERY broad.
 
Yeah I'm taking it in late August and am wondering much of the same things.

I emailed TBR and they're publishing their review books sometime in Jan. or Feb.

There's one study schedule here: http://forums.studentdoctor.net/thr...e-mcat-2015-100-days-to-mcat-success.1101251/

I'm pretty sure you do get one single score but it's reported along with a confidence interval. source Kind of dumb IMO.

I think you can get an idea of score comparisons by looking at percentile charts side-by-side. Based on my quick and dirty analysis:
516 ~ 35
506 ~ 30
500 ~ 25
source and source

I think my goal will be 515. but we'll see once the practice test dust clears.
 
*Accidentally bumped wrong thread a min ago XD

Hey guys! So I've been looking around as well, and this is one schedule I came upon that was posted by NextStep. I know NextStep is it's own test prep company, but they've been doing a great job being quite neutral and reviewing other test prep companies as well. I still try to follow the advice to "take everything with a grain of salt," solet me hear what you guys think!

http://forums.studentdoctor.net/thr...e-mcat-2015-100-days-to-mcat-success.1101251/
 
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