What was BS like before the change?
The exact same. Seriously, trawl the SDN archives, you'll find people complaining about the "new BS" even back in 2003. For whatever reason SDN apparently forgets and then remembers that BS is about critical thinking, not memorization, every year.
Don't believe me?
http://forums.sdn.net/showthread.php?p=664158
How do the recent ones relate to say, AAMC 11? Harder?
The same. All the passages were experimental, most were about on par with (if not slightly easier than) the ebola passage in AAMC 11 although none of them took me as long as ebola did to solve.
Anyway, if you want to prepare for experimental BS, just make sure you can do the following:
- Understand the rationale of experiments (why a researcher chose his particular methodology, why he studied what he did, why he looked at the variables he looked at)
- Understand simple graphs and figures. You should be able to read a line graph, scatterplot, histogram, and data table with ease. And by "read" I mean you can look at it and know what the results of the experiment were and what conclusions can be made without referring to the passage.
- Be able to take results and translate them into conclusions.
The questions themselves are just testing the stuff you studied, albeit in an indirect way that tests multiple concepts at once. For example:
- Part of a passage may detail an experiment in which an experimenter isolated a mutant protein and ran it on an electrophoresis gel along with the wildtype protein. He found that the mutant protein traveled twice as far as the wildtype protein. A question might then ask you what kind of gene mutation most likely caused the altered protein, to which the answer would be "nonsense mutation". Essentially all this question was asking was "what kind of mutation creates a shorter version of a protein?"
- A passage may talk about the effects of a peptide hormone Y (let's say it causes a cell to release another substance, hormone X), and then talk about how during an experiment an experimenter administered a receptor antagonist in vitro. It will then give you a graph showing hormone X vs hormone Y concentrations with two lines, one for the control condition and another for the antagonist condition. The graph shows that for the control condition the line increases linearly and then hits an asymptote. Meanwhile the antagonist condition shows that the line increases linearly for a fraction of the time as the control group and then hits an asymptote at a level of hormone Y 1/5th that of the control group. The passage might then ask what kind of antagonist was used, to which the correct answer would be "allosteric inhibitor". All this question was asking was "what kind of inhibitor can't be overcome with increased substrate concentration?"
If you want materials to practice with, the Kaplan section tests and TPRH science workbook are your best bets. The Official Guide to the MCAT also has 6 passages which are exactly like what you'll see on the real exam, but you only get 6 of them. Personally I thought the AAMCs were good practice for this too, but apparently I'm the only person on this site who thinks that.
bio was supposed to be my strength
