What was the most helpful/harmful thing(s) you learned from a prep course

[deleted688779]

I am still deciding whether or not to sign up (and pay thousands) for a prep course. So instead of asking "should I take a prep-course?" and getting a bunch of "it's all up to you, bro" replies, I want to know what about the prep-course you took made it helpful/harmful towards your MCAT score. What did you benefit from it? What was most valuable? Could you have learned it without a course, and if so at expense of how much time? Etc. I want to know it all (or as much as you have time to type out).

Also I kind of want to know whether anyone feels like they did worse with a prep course compared to self-study.

Thanks in advance, much appreciated!

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[raca1111]

I think it was helpful in that it kept me on schedule and I really had very little room for procrastination. It was nice having a teacher also rehash and solidify and concepts that I had read about the day before. My problem with it is that if you really do do all of the readings, it makes it hard to have time to also take practice exams because there is just so much material that is covered during the course. Yes, learning it is definitely possible on your own - not many pay 3000 bucks to take an MCAT course! What I recommend though is that you make sure to take practice exams and do as many practice questions as you can. That is really when you start to see improvement. It's important to have the knowledge to begin with, but without practicing with passages and exams, you will not be well prepared for the MCAT.

 

[NextStepTutor_3]

The most helpful thing I ever learned was that there's only one right answer to MCAT questions, and that in general, you should aim for finding the "least bad" answer instead of the "best" one. This does a couple of insanely helpful things - it emphasizes how helpful it is to use process of elimination, and it prevents you from being immediately drawn to an answer that is 90% perfect but 10% wrong. If you get rid of the wrong answers, you'll be left with the right one. It sounds dumb, but it helped a lot.

Could you get this knowledge without a prep course? Definitely. Prep courses are good - sometimes really good - for the "average" student, and not as good for others. What I think a LOT of students get out of it is the time management aspect. The thing is that you can learn anything through self-study, or with a tutor, but people who are used to the classroom style of learning sometimes just don't learn it, or don't know where to start. So my advice is that whatever you do, enlist someone to help you make a plan. Whether it's a prep course or a tutor or a friend or people on SDN, it saves so much time to know what you're supposed to be doing, even in a general sense.

But in summary (just in my opinion) - if you take a good number of full-length practice exams and go over them until you understand absolutely everything, and if you keep track of what kind of mistakes you make and when, you'll get WAY more knowledge than you would in most classroom courses.

 

[zhonghang]

The most helpful thing I ever learned was that there's only one right answer to MCAT questions, and that in general, you should aim for finding the "least bad" answer instead of the "best" one. This does a couple of insanely helpful things - it emphasizes how helpful it is to use process of elimination, and it prevents you from being immediately drawn to an answer that is 90% perfect but 10% wrong. If you get rid of the wrong answers, you'll be left with the right one. It sounds dumb, but it helped a lot.

Could you get this knowledge without a prep course? Definitely. Prep courses are good - sometimes really good - for the "average" student, and not as good for others. What I think a LOT of students get out of it is the time management aspect. The thing is that you can learn anything through self-study, or with a tutor, but people who are used to the classroom style of learning sometimes just don't learn it, or don't know where to start. So my advice is that whatever you do, enlist someone to help you make a plan. Whether it's a prep course or a tutor or a friend or people on SDN, it saves so much time to know what you're supposed to be doing, even in a general sense.

But in summary (just in my opinion) - if you take a good number of full-length practice exams and go over them until you understand absolutely everything, and if you keep track of what kind of mistakes you make and when, you'll get WAY more knowledge than you would in most classroom courses.

So do you suggest spending significantly more time each day doing practice FLs rather than reading books for content review? I guess a better way to phrase this question is, do you believe if you take a significant number of full-length practice exams and thoroughly review them, you'll eventually cover everything that would be in your content books?

 

[ieatshrimp24]

Pros: it kept me on schedule, I had great science teachers, extra passages not available at the bookstore, the best advice they gave me was to think conceptually for the biological sciences
Cons: money, time, the verbal teacher wasn't very good, some days they had to reschedule classes, no real biochemistry overview in class (at the time)

If it means anything, I took the old MCAT without a course and I took the current MCAT with a course. I did significantly better the second time.

 

[NextStepTutor_3]

So do you suggest spending significantly more time each day doing practice FLs rather than reading books for content review? I guess a better way to phrase this question is, do you believe if you take a significant number of full-length practice exams and thoroughly review them, you'll eventually cover everything that would be in your content books?

That's a question I get asked all the time! It depends on your timeframe. Ideally, I recommend using mainly content books first, enough to get a strong foundation in the science. Otherwise, when you start taking FLs, it will be harder to isolate your "strategy / reasoning" problems (as in, it will be more difficult to know which missed questions are due to an inadequate understanding of the content, and which were tricky for a different reason).

But I definitely advise spending the last 1.5 months of your prep with a heavy focus on full-length tests, taken under test-like conditions (and passages from other sources too). In other words, if you don't have a ton of time for thorough content review and you take 5-6 full-length exams, you'll likely be exposed to 90-95% of what you'd see on the exam. Of course, this does depend which tests they are. And if you take this approach, it's enormously important to review your full-lengths especially carefully, and to be willing to go back to a content book when you spot a content-related issue that gave you trouble. For example, if you miss a couple of questions about fluids, close the test and do a short review of the concepts that you missed before moving forward.

Good luck!