One last thing. Just found this from someone on this website who posted 2 weeks ago. It's a good example of what you probably can do over a longer period of time to prepare rather than the 50 days this guy did it in:
Hello all, I am sharing this because I think it is important to let everyone who is studying for this life consuming exam know that there is no one way to be successful on test day. I studied for a total of 50 days, but had those 50 days completely free and dedicated to studying for the MCAT. I completed the june exam with a preliminary percentile in the 90th-100th range. I used the EK books along with the Khan academy videos, and AAMC Q packs. I also bought the TPR book about 6 months before I started studying but never used it, however this gave me access to their 4 full length exams.
Background: I am a 25 year old post-graduate student with a criminology degree who attended law school partially before rerouting to this path. With that said, I have taken all of the science related pre-reqs in the last year and a half, one after another, which I feel may have been an advantage as everything was fairly fresh. I did NOT take biochem before taking this exam, but had an extremely thorough understanding of organic chemistry which I feel helped tremendously. I finished my final semester on May 1st and sat for the June 20th exam, and only studied during that time frame.
Schedule: For the first twenty days I did content review for everything except for physics (my weakest section). My thoughts were that there was not a significant chance for me to improve my understanding in such a small amount of time and therefore reviewing this section would be extremely low yield.
I went to campus (go to anywhere you feel you can study without being distracted, for me this is away from home) and studied for 6-8 hours a day for 6-7 days a week. And I mean it. With this condensed time frame there is no way around the fact that you need to put in massive hours to reach your goal. I read each individual EK book from front to back before starting the next, and used the method that the books proposed by reading first without highlighting or answering questions, and then going back and reading again at a later time.
The EK books are broken up pretty well and I would read each chapter, take a small break of about five minutes, and then start the next chapter. I would do this for 3-4 hours, take lunch, and then head back and repeat.
After these twenty days and in the month leading up to the exam i completed about 11 full length practice exams. For ~5 of them I did NOT take them as actual exams, but rather skipped to the section that I was reviewing and did the questions, untimed, for a single section. I would take one full length exam on Saturday with breaks, which took about 7 hours, and then went home without reviewing the answers. On Sunday I would review the test results and continue content review which I repeated for 3-4 days until taking another full length. I took ~6 emulated full lengths leading up to the exam with 4 days between each.
During the last week I was completely sick of the MCAT and did not do another practice test. I ramped down studying and did content review for physics (the section I neglected at the beginning) as well as going over any section I felt was weak or needed refreshing. As hard as it was, I did not look at anything the day before the exam.
Tidbits:
1. Exam review is KEY. at the beginning of my studies I had no idea what I was doing and although I had a very solid base for the subjects, I had little experience for the SPECIFICS of the exam. It was not important that I was ready to take the practice exams. My first practice exam score was a 495. What was important was that I reviewed the answers to the exams including why the wrong answers were wrong, and developed a thorough understanding of the question and answer.
2. Take as many exams as humanly possible. I think that my overall exposure was the key to my success on the exam. I did thousands of questions and I did all of my tests multiple times in order to solidify my understanding. I don't think it is critically important that you do each test in a complete and timed setting, as I simply reviewed individual sections and skipped through exams all the time to get to the sections that I wanted.
3. EK is not enough to do well. It doesn't cover nearly any of the biochem needed. I supplemented this with the biochem related Khan videos and I think this was sufficient. Know your amino acids, and know how polarity and acidity affect interactions.
4. Study for the psych section. It is extremely high yield. I think that a lot of people are afraid of it and don't understand it, but who cares. It simply isn't as hard as the other sections if you give yourself sufficient exposure to the content. Unfortunately, no one book is sufficient to cover the material. This is where the 12 practice exams were useful, as I made note cards for the material that I was previously not exposed to.
5. Don't let practice exam scores get you down. I took 12 tests and never got above a 502 on any of them, and I am going to come out with a 515+.
6. The idea that this exam will only test content related to the body and medicine seemed to be overstated. I felt like this test wasn't VERY different from the old exams, albeit much longer and with more analysis of data. You will still get physics questions that have seemingly no relation to the human body, etc.
The point of this post is that with the right work ethic, you can do it any way that you need to. This is NOT a suggestion to study for less time. I was in a bind, and did what I needed to be successful. It is simply a reminder that there is no one way, and to not get caught up in everything that everyone at SDN has to say. Every person is an individual and there is no one size fits all study plan.
This exam is a monster, but you can do it! If you have any more questions for me about anything feel free to ask.
