Advice for new BS section....

Started by dartmed
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dartmed

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I took my MCAT two times and I recently finished the BS section for today's MCAT. I wanted to send a forewarning for future test-takers to not rely on as much content, but to start reading journal articles. Every single passage today was from a journal article (I am extremely serious with the exception of one Organic passage). Period. I literally checked the sources at the end and they are from Nature, Cell, etc.

It was excruciatingly painful to prepare for the BS in a completely different way than we are used to. To belabor my point, one of the passages was from a journal article that was published in 2012. Verbatim. With the same graphs. Hopefully, that helps someone. I have to admit that it was extremely unfair of AAMC to do this without any sort of warning. Especially when the AAMC 11 was not reflective of how difficult the BS was today.
 
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dartmed said:
I took my MCAT two times and I recently finished the BS section for today's MCAT. I wanted to send a forewarning for future test-takers to not rely on as much content, but to start reading journal articles. Every single passage today was from a journal article (I am extremely serious with the exception of one Organic passage). Period. I literally checked the sources at the end and they are from Nature, Cell, etc.

It was excruciatingly painful to prepare for the BS in a completely different way than we are used to. To belabor my point, one of the passages was from a journal article that was published in 2012. Verbatim. With the same graphs. Hopefully, that helps someone. I have to admit that it was extremely unfair of AAMC to do this without any sort of warning. Especially when the AAMC 11 was not reflective of how difficult the BS was today.
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I agree completely. I took the 8/4 test and was blown away by the BS section, along with many, many others. I voided and will be retaking in January. I've been hopping around asking different Biology professors if they have any old abstracts I could thumb through. They were all very happy to let me have a copy.

Great post. 👍
 
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indianjatt said:
What kind of journal articles? I feel like most do not seem like they would apply to a test like the MCAT
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OP means to gain experience in reading and understanding scientific journal articles. Not to learn and absorb information from them.

Depends on what your interests are. Neuroscience? Hit up J of Neurosci. Or take a different approach with general articles in the more popular, widely read journals, such as Science, Cell, Nature.
 
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theNard said:
OP means to gain experience in reading and understanding scientific journal articles. Not to learn and absorb information from them.

Depends on what your interests are. Neuroscience? Hit up J of Neurosci. Or take a different approach with general articles in the more popular, widely read journals, such as Science, Cell, Nature.
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Exactly. Look-up relevant review articles/experiments for specific topics (aka journal articles that discovered myosin, why they think it's myosin, reasoning behind it, etc.)
 
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I took test #11 today and I got caught off-guard for the ebola passage. I only got 2 wrong so I didn't completely bomb it but I feel like I gotta change my strategy for this exam. So I feel like reviewing concepts about experimental setup and controls will probably help. What do you guys think?
 
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How do you think we should analyze journal articles that we read online? Should we write summaries, or try and answer questions or something like that? Also, should we focus more on the experimental set up and techniques?
 
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datanator said:
I took test #11 today and I got caught off-guard for the ebola passage. I only got 2 wrong so I didn't completely bomb it but I feel like I gotta change my strategy for this exam. So I feel like reviewing concepts about experimental setup and controls will probably help. What do you guys think?
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If Ebola passage scares you, embrace yourself. Every passage I had today was either harder than the Ebola or on the same level. Except the Organic one. I am not joking or exaggerating when I say this.

Start interpreting complex data and graphs. Start thinking about experiments and how to set-up experiments with all the material that you know. Read graphs - understand the rationale of the experiment. Try to make sense of an article in less than 5-6 mins.
 
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John Snow said:
Do you think we should just read the abstracts or the first couple of paragraphs? I don't know if I could read an entire article in 5-6 minutes.
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There are no entire journal articles on BS. That would take way too long.

You should just be comfortable seeing passages that are pieces of scientific articles. Being able to decipher graphs, and not be intimated by the scientific language is huge for BS. You definitely do NOT need to keep up with the current literature on any of the topics covered by BS. All the information you need is either in the passage or some basic concept covered in review books.
 
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theNard said:
OP means to gain experience in reading and understanding scientific journal articles. Not to learn and absorb information from them.

Depends on what your interests are. Neuroscience? Hit up J of Neurosci. Or take a different approach with general articles in the more popular, widely read journals, such as Science, Cell, Nature.
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I would actually recommend against reading articles in the field you're interested in. Doing that means you'll be in your comfort zone. IMO it's better to stick with a general journal like Nature or Science and read whatever bio articles they have in there. That way you get a nice exposure to molecular biology, biochemistry, microbiology, neuroscience, etc.

Also, for people wondering how to read these articles for preparation, you should focus on the intro and results. The intro should give you all the background you'll need to understand the results (if it doesn't then the methods section most certainly will). When you read the results section your goal should be to figure out everything that the study found. In other words, you shouldn't even have to read the discussion section to know what the conclusions were, although you still should just to make sure the conclusions you reached were correct (granted the authors may have made poor conclusions, but if you're reading a top tier journal this is not likely the case).

Also, don't be too intimidated by the crazy figures you're going to see in journal articles, especially those in top tier journals where the authors like to get "creative" with their data presentation (I remember reading a neuroscience paper where the authors presented their data in several three-axis color coded matrices). On the MCAT all you're ever going to see are bar graphs, simple line plots, and very short tables. In fact, what you see on the MCAT is much simpler than anything you're going to see in a journal article. Even though the MCAT bio passages are taken from real articles, I suspect they're actually simplified reconstructions of the original figures (I'm too lazy to look up the citations given in passages to confirm that suspicion, but I'd be surprised if it weren't true).
 
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practice the experimental passages on the practice tests. Make sure you know how to answer those types of questions and you can interpret graphs/tables
 
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Also remember yours might not be that way. I just had a person who took theirs last week and they said the Bio was so easy they couldn't believe it. However, their PS they said was brutal.
 
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I don't see the problem with being given parts of journal articles/abstracts as MCAT passages.

As long as you understand the required biology concepts/vocabulary, you should be fine answering questions whether the passage was written by an AAMC writer or a person writing for a scientific journal.

You might even be better off with the journal articles since the writers of those have a much greater imperative to write in a way that many people can understand than do the writers for AAMC passages.
 
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V5RED said:
I don't see the problem with being given parts of journal articles/abstracts as MCAT passages.

As long as you understand the required biology concepts/vocabulary, you should be fine answering questions whether the passage was written by an AAMC writer or a person writing for a scientific journal.

You might even be better off with the journal articles since the writers of those have a much greater imperative to write in a way that many people can understand than do the writers for AAMC passages.
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agreed 👍
 
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I am way ahead of you. I have a friend who happens to have a subscription of Nature and Cell magazine straight to his iDevice.

Thanks for the heads up.
 
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La Presse said:
I am way ahead of you. I have a friend who happens to have a subscription of Nature and Cell magazine straight to his iDevice.

Thanks for the heads up.
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Just to add to this, if you're on a college campus you should have access to all of Nature and Cell's articles on their websites for free (if you don't your college sucks, sorry). If you're not on a campus though (or your college sucks) then there are good free journals out there, most notably PLoS One.
 
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OCDOCDOCD said:
Just to add to this, if you're on a college campus you should have access to all of Nature and Cell's articles on their websites for free (if you don't your college sucks, sorry). If you're not on a campus though (or your college sucks) then there are good free journals out there, most notably PLoS One.
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At my uni. we had access to articles off campus as while, we could access them through our uni. lib website.... the password was our student id number.
 
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OCDOCDOCD said:
Just to add to this, if you're on a college campus you should have access to all of Nature and Cell's articles on their websites for free (if you don't your college sucks, sorry). If you're not on a campus though (or your college sucks) then there are good free journals out there, most notably PLoS One.
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Surprisingly, ours has them through our research database. I am impressed. 😱
 
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Thanks for the posts guys.

How helpful would it be to learn PCR, southern/northern/western blots, gel electrophoresis, patch/voltage clamp, restriction enzymes etc. for the BS section?
 
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La Presse said:
Surprisingly, ours has them through our research database. I am impressed. 😱
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Every half-decent college should have a subscription to the major scientific journals. Research universities in particular will have subscriptions to the majority of journals out there, and for the biggest ones it should be very rare when you run across a journal that you can't immediately access. Even small liberal arts colleges need those institutional subscriptions so that students can actually write research papers. Research universities need them so that grad students, post docs, and professors can actually do their work.

On a related note, many hospitals will also have institutional journal subscriptions, so if you find yourself in a hospital a lot you can probably hop on their wifi network and get access to papers from there as well.
 
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5ng5 said:
where can u find a good range of Articles to read?
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I don't think reading articles should be a normal part of studying for the MCAT. You aren't trying to memorize material from them, or anything like that. If you are comfortable with the prose and methods of showing data/results in graphs and tables than you have everything you need in terms of scientific articles.

Your time is probably better spent on practice passages.
 
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Renaissance Man said:
I don't think reading articles should be a normal part of studying for the MCAT. You aren't trying to memorize material from them, or anything like that. If you are comfortable with the prose and methods of showing data/results in graphs and tables than you have everything you need in terms of scientific articles.

Your time is probably better spent on practice passages.
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Agreed. You have to be able to understand how experiments are conducted and how to deduce results/conclusions from them. That was how my entire BS test was organized.
 
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