Introduction and General Tips
In my stint here on the SDN website, I have met many different kinds of people who are all preparing for their MCAT - the most significant test they have taken to date - and many of you are terrified of the very prospect of studying for or taking the MCAT. It's no small task and to take it and do well is even harder. So in the last few months, I have explored different ways to prepare for the MCAT and I am here now to tell you how I studied.
Unlike what many people on here seem to believe, scoring in the 520+ range is not due to mere luck. It is an art. Not an art in the modern sense of the term, but rather in the sense that the ancients knew as "techne." If you go about memorizing random concepts and facts, then scoring in that range will indeed be luck for you. But if you go about studying in an efficient and effective manner, then you can build your confidence as well as develop your art. The reason most people believe that it is "luck "to score in the 520+ range is because they don't understand that you can't study for the MCAT like many pre-meds study for an Orgo exam, for example. That is, instead of memorizing minute details, you need to grasp the general concepts and be fluid enough to apply it to any situation you encounter on the MCAT. This is very important. In fact, I have had heated conversations with several members on here who believe that the key to scoring in the 99th percentile is memorizing minutiae. It is not.
In fact, this is the very reason why I am so against any flashcards. Students spend hundreds of hours with their fancy flashcards and try to memorize the definition of every term and every equation. This is a waste of computational space. You should be familiar enough with the terms to understand them but fluid and flexible enough to apply them to any passage you encounter. That's why understanding is so important as compared to memorization.
So, that said, how do you study then? Well, I will start out by listing the materials I used (no expensive prep courses or tutors necessary) and then study strategies for each section. Keep in mind that this approach is not a one-size-fits-all approach and oftentimes you have to find your own path.
Materials and Methods
I will list in order of decreasing importance:
AAMC Section Bank
AAMC Scored FL
AAMC Sample FL
AAMC Question Packs
Khan Academy B/BC and P/S Passages
Kaplan 7-book series and 3 included FLs
Okay, so I should clarify that I am not advertising one test prep company over others. In fact, I believe that all test prep companies will prepare you equally well content-wise for the MCAT although some might take a more roundabout way of doing it. So some companies might be like that long-winded teacher you had who would drawl on and on and on about things you didn't necessarily have to know whereas other companies are like the SparkNotes version of the first teacher.
The key to doing well is not content review but rather practice passages. This cannot be emphasized enough. As I said above, rote memorization won't help you on the MCAT, period. It's your logic and reasoning abilities that will set you apart. That's not to say you don't need any content knowledge. Quite the contrary, actually. Not only do you need basic content knowledge but you also need to be able to reason based on that content knowledge. So for example, you need to know that leucine, alanine, and valine are hydrophobic but that won't help you answer the question completely on the exam - you need to be able to reason that if a residue is buried, for example, it will want to interact via vdW/hydrophobic contacts and thus will want to be a nonpolar residue that packs well into the local structure.
C/P
Ah, this is my favorite section. I am a chemist by training, so this is the section I prepped the least for. If you're rusty on these topics, I would suggest you go through the content review books thoroughly.
Contrary to popular belief, you don't need to memorize a huge list of equations just for the MCAT. If you did your undergraduate studies right, you likely won't need to memorize any equations at all - the common ones that come up on the MCAT will be so commonly used in science that you should already know them from using them so much in your courses/research. An example is F = m*a or E = 1/2*m*v^2 or E = h*f. Complex, esoteric equations should be given to you in the problem. So instead of memorizing equations you will never use, make that space in your brain available for computations that form the core of scientific logic and reasoning!
As a direct corollary of this, you should know how to use dimensional analysis. This is an important skill to have not only for the MCAT but for life in general. If you are given numbers with units and told to find some unknown quantity, you can likely figure it out simply by using dimensional analysis. This is a shortcut on the MCAT if you find yourself at a loss for an equation (which you should never be because you were a good physics student!).
In terms of chemistry, you should make sure you understand why certain things work the way they do and not just memorize. In freshman organic chemistry, you probably memorized a list of reactions and what transformations they enact. For the MCAT, you will barely use any of those but the ones that do appear will require more in-depth knowledge than just knowing what the basic transformation is. For example, you might encounter an experiment that labels certain carbons or oxygens in a large substrate and require you to follow the atom through a mechanism that isn't shown explicitly. This would require an understanding of how to deconstruct bonds in a way that an organic chemist - or, in this case, the best organic chemist known, aka nature - would. This level of understanding is achieved by always asking the question "why?" when you're doing your content review. Ask yourself why a certain reaction happens when you see it. Or, more broadly, ask yourself why you would want fetal hemoglobin to have a higher O2 affinity than maternal hemoglobin. See if you can answer these kinds of questions and if not, then Google is your best friend - and it's free!
CARS
CARS studying really takes time. I don't mean that it's time-consuming - rather, it's a skill that you either have or don't and it takes time to build. If you don't do as well as you hoped in this section, don't expect to be able to study for two months and then get a 5 point increase in your score. Reading skills take a lot longer than that to develop and it's best to start early.
So what do I mean by start early? Well, you should constantly be reading. In today's day and age, the novel has been superseded by the television and the Netflix. Think about how much time a day you actually spend reading something that isn't a required reading for class. 15 minutes? 20? You need to get into the habit of reading - and I'm not talking about Sports Illustrated. You need to be reading well-constructed and well-argued articles. You can usually find these in reputable magazines and journals like NYTimes, The Economist, WSJ, etc. I personally prefer the opinions section of the NYTimes. Read for comprehension as well as critique. Think about what point the author is trying to make and if it makes sense. Then, think about what assumptions or holes the author's argument contains. You need to be at the point where you can do this subconsciously. That, of course, takes time - who said doing well on the MCAT could be achieved in a short period of time? Your reading doesn't have to be isolated to periodicals - any sort of well-written novel or non-fiction book would also do just fine. Ideally, you should be reading a mix of these, as you will encounter different types of passages in CARS.
B/BC
For this section, the key is to do practice passages as soon as possible. The field of biology is so large that it's pointless to memorize every little detail that could show up on the MCAT. There is literally an ocean of facts to choose from (as opposed to a much smaller pool for chemistry and physics due to the limited scope of the MCAT). Plus, the MCAT makers know this and so the passages are usually very data-driven. You need to be able to interpret scientific data that could show up in an article somewhere.
So how do you improve at that? You read the scientific literature and keep up with it. If you're doing research, you should be keeping up to date with your field anyway and this won't be a problem. For those of you who are still undergraduates not doing research, it's still a good idea to keep up with the literature in fields that you enjoy. Try to read one or two articles a week from the high-impact journals in your field. For many, that's some variation of Nature, Science, Cell, some variation of Nature like Nature Chemistry, Nature Chemical Biology, Nature Nanotechnology, etc. When you read the paper, try to interpret the figures and tables without reading the caption first. You can read the caption afterwards to see if you interpreted the data the same way the authors did. Note I didn't say the "correct" way. If you're good, sometimes you'll spot fallacies in the authors' interpretations when you take an unbiased view of the data and at that point, you'll know that you are prepared to interpret any sort of data the MCAT will throw at you.
For this section especially, there are some concepts that are absolutely essential to know. I know I said rote memorization is bad earlier on but in biology, you can't get away with understanding only first principles because the very field is based on memorization and less on mechanistic understanding - mainly because mechanistic probes of anything in biological systems are exceedingly difficult to generate. So the main topics to know are your amino acids (structures, 1- and 3-letter codes, properties, pKa values of side chains would be nice but not essential), glycolysis, gluconeogenesis, TCA cycle, oxidative phosphorylation, and the key steps of the pentose phosphate pathway, glycogen synthesis, beta oxidation, and lipid biosynthesis.
No, you do not need to "memorize" all the structures above. However, you should know the purpose of each pathway and why each step is carried out - especially in the central metabolic pathway of life: glycolysis --> TCA cycle --> oxidative phosphorylation. There is a chemical logic to each step and you should understand that. You should be so familiar with this that if I ask you what fumarase does and why it's necessary, you should immediately be able to answer. Again, you should seek understanding and not rote memorization. At the very least, you should be able to recognize the structures if they are given to you.
For this section particularly, Khan Academy practice passages are a great resource. There are a lot of data-driven passages on there that are excellent practice for the MCAT.
P/S
Ah, the new section. This section is perhaps the hardest to prepare for because prep companies have the least experience with it and the AAMC materials are currently limited. In my opinion, Kaplan does an excellent job introducing the key concepts and terminology of these disciplines that you need to know. For this section, you should be able to interpret all sorts of graphs and charts. Again, Khan Academy practice passages give you excellent practice in this area. When you see a chart or graph, you should immediately be able to pick out the most important things in the chart/graph and glean from it what the authors are trying to tell you with that data. Don't get bogged down in the details at the beginning - just look at the data and the general trends. This is where reading the scientific literature will come in handy.
On top of that, you also need to know basic psychology/sociology terminology. Taking intro-level courses in these disciplines may be a good idea for that and I know it helped me a little even though I took those courses years ago. But this is also where a lot of pre-meds fall into the trap of rote memorization vs. understanding. It's easy to take a bunch of flashcards and memorize the definition of every term on the AAMC lists. In fact, I would argue that even a monkey could do that. But that results in an inflexible vocabulary (functional fixedness, anyone?) - in other words, it's hard to apply these rigid definitions to new situations like you will encounter in passages. A better way to study is to try to grasp the main idea behind these terms. So you could go and memorize that cultural relativism is viewing another culture in terms of its own norms and mores. You could put that on a notecard, look at it every day, and have these words memorized verbatim by next week. But that doesn't mean you'll be able to apply it correctly come test day. So instead, you should know that the idea behind cultural relativism is that one is completely unbiased when judging another culture. So, "When a physician keeps insistently telling a patient that obesity is an illness despite the patient, always taught by her ethnic parents that obesity is personal choice, continually refusing to believe him/her, the physician has failed to observe which of the following? A) Linguistic relativity B) Ethnocentrism C) Cultural Relativism D) Assimilation."
Final Thoughts
If you've read all of this, you should realize that the MCAT is not something you can do well on if you start completely from scratch. Preparing for the MCAT, in a sense, begins at day one. You need to develop your scientific logic and reasoning skills as well as reading comprehension and verbal reasoning throughout your undergraduate studies and maintain those skills as you go along. If you do those things, scoring in that coveted 520+ range should not be a matter of luck but rather of techne.
As a direct consequence of the above, by the time you start studying, you should already have the requisite scientific reasoning skills to do well on the MCAT. Your main challenge should simply be to apply those skills to MCAT-style passages and timing.
I will continue adding to this and editing as more thoughts come to me.
Good luck on your studies!
In my stint here on the SDN website, I have met many different kinds of people who are all preparing for their MCAT - the most significant test they have taken to date - and many of you are terrified of the very prospect of studying for or taking the MCAT. It's no small task and to take it and do well is even harder. So in the last few months, I have explored different ways to prepare for the MCAT and I am here now to tell you how I studied.
Unlike what many people on here seem to believe, scoring in the 520+ range is not due to mere luck. It is an art. Not an art in the modern sense of the term, but rather in the sense that the ancients knew as "techne." If you go about memorizing random concepts and facts, then scoring in that range will indeed be luck for you. But if you go about studying in an efficient and effective manner, then you can build your confidence as well as develop your art. The reason most people believe that it is "luck "to score in the 520+ range is because they don't understand that you can't study for the MCAT like many pre-meds study for an Orgo exam, for example. That is, instead of memorizing minute details, you need to grasp the general concepts and be fluid enough to apply it to any situation you encounter on the MCAT. This is very important. In fact, I have had heated conversations with several members on here who believe that the key to scoring in the 99th percentile is memorizing minutiae. It is not.
In fact, this is the very reason why I am so against any flashcards. Students spend hundreds of hours with their fancy flashcards and try to memorize the definition of every term and every equation. This is a waste of computational space. You should be familiar enough with the terms to understand them but fluid and flexible enough to apply them to any passage you encounter. That's why understanding is so important as compared to memorization.
So, that said, how do you study then? Well, I will start out by listing the materials I used (no expensive prep courses or tutors necessary) and then study strategies for each section. Keep in mind that this approach is not a one-size-fits-all approach and oftentimes you have to find your own path.
Materials and Methods
I will list in order of decreasing importance:
AAMC Section Bank
AAMC Scored FL
AAMC Sample FL
AAMC Question Packs
Khan Academy B/BC and P/S Passages
Kaplan 7-book series and 3 included FLs
Okay, so I should clarify that I am not advertising one test prep company over others. In fact, I believe that all test prep companies will prepare you equally well content-wise for the MCAT although some might take a more roundabout way of doing it. So some companies might be like that long-winded teacher you had who would drawl on and on and on about things you didn't necessarily have to know whereas other companies are like the SparkNotes version of the first teacher.
The key to doing well is not content review but rather practice passages. This cannot be emphasized enough. As I said above, rote memorization won't help you on the MCAT, period. It's your logic and reasoning abilities that will set you apart. That's not to say you don't need any content knowledge. Quite the contrary, actually. Not only do you need basic content knowledge but you also need to be able to reason based on that content knowledge. So for example, you need to know that leucine, alanine, and valine are hydrophobic but that won't help you answer the question completely on the exam - you need to be able to reason that if a residue is buried, for example, it will want to interact via vdW/hydrophobic contacts and thus will want to be a nonpolar residue that packs well into the local structure.
C/P
Ah, this is my favorite section. I am a chemist by training, so this is the section I prepped the least for. If you're rusty on these topics, I would suggest you go through the content review books thoroughly.
Contrary to popular belief, you don't need to memorize a huge list of equations just for the MCAT. If you did your undergraduate studies right, you likely won't need to memorize any equations at all - the common ones that come up on the MCAT will be so commonly used in science that you should already know them from using them so much in your courses/research. An example is F = m*a or E = 1/2*m*v^2 or E = h*f. Complex, esoteric equations should be given to you in the problem. So instead of memorizing equations you will never use, make that space in your brain available for computations that form the core of scientific logic and reasoning!
As a direct corollary of this, you should know how to use dimensional analysis. This is an important skill to have not only for the MCAT but for life in general. If you are given numbers with units and told to find some unknown quantity, you can likely figure it out simply by using dimensional analysis. This is a shortcut on the MCAT if you find yourself at a loss for an equation (which you should never be because you were a good physics student!).
In terms of chemistry, you should make sure you understand why certain things work the way they do and not just memorize. In freshman organic chemistry, you probably memorized a list of reactions and what transformations they enact. For the MCAT, you will barely use any of those but the ones that do appear will require more in-depth knowledge than just knowing what the basic transformation is. For example, you might encounter an experiment that labels certain carbons or oxygens in a large substrate and require you to follow the atom through a mechanism that isn't shown explicitly. This would require an understanding of how to deconstruct bonds in a way that an organic chemist - or, in this case, the best organic chemist known, aka nature - would. This level of understanding is achieved by always asking the question "why?" when you're doing your content review. Ask yourself why a certain reaction happens when you see it. Or, more broadly, ask yourself why you would want fetal hemoglobin to have a higher O2 affinity than maternal hemoglobin. See if you can answer these kinds of questions and if not, then Google is your best friend - and it's free!
CARS
CARS studying really takes time. I don't mean that it's time-consuming - rather, it's a skill that you either have or don't and it takes time to build. If you don't do as well as you hoped in this section, don't expect to be able to study for two months and then get a 5 point increase in your score. Reading skills take a lot longer than that to develop and it's best to start early.
So what do I mean by start early? Well, you should constantly be reading. In today's day and age, the novel has been superseded by the television and the Netflix. Think about how much time a day you actually spend reading something that isn't a required reading for class. 15 minutes? 20? You need to get into the habit of reading - and I'm not talking about Sports Illustrated. You need to be reading well-constructed and well-argued articles. You can usually find these in reputable magazines and journals like NYTimes, The Economist, WSJ, etc. I personally prefer the opinions section of the NYTimes. Read for comprehension as well as critique. Think about what point the author is trying to make and if it makes sense. Then, think about what assumptions or holes the author's argument contains. You need to be at the point where you can do this subconsciously. That, of course, takes time - who said doing well on the MCAT could be achieved in a short period of time? Your reading doesn't have to be isolated to periodicals - any sort of well-written novel or non-fiction book would also do just fine. Ideally, you should be reading a mix of these, as you will encounter different types of passages in CARS.
B/BC
For this section, the key is to do practice passages as soon as possible. The field of biology is so large that it's pointless to memorize every little detail that could show up on the MCAT. There is literally an ocean of facts to choose from (as opposed to a much smaller pool for chemistry and physics due to the limited scope of the MCAT). Plus, the MCAT makers know this and so the passages are usually very data-driven. You need to be able to interpret scientific data that could show up in an article somewhere.
So how do you improve at that? You read the scientific literature and keep up with it. If you're doing research, you should be keeping up to date with your field anyway and this won't be a problem. For those of you who are still undergraduates not doing research, it's still a good idea to keep up with the literature in fields that you enjoy. Try to read one or two articles a week from the high-impact journals in your field. For many, that's some variation of Nature, Science, Cell, some variation of Nature like Nature Chemistry, Nature Chemical Biology, Nature Nanotechnology, etc. When you read the paper, try to interpret the figures and tables without reading the caption first. You can read the caption afterwards to see if you interpreted the data the same way the authors did. Note I didn't say the "correct" way. If you're good, sometimes you'll spot fallacies in the authors' interpretations when you take an unbiased view of the data and at that point, you'll know that you are prepared to interpret any sort of data the MCAT will throw at you.
For this section especially, there are some concepts that are absolutely essential to know. I know I said rote memorization is bad earlier on but in biology, you can't get away with understanding only first principles because the very field is based on memorization and less on mechanistic understanding - mainly because mechanistic probes of anything in biological systems are exceedingly difficult to generate. So the main topics to know are your amino acids (structures, 1- and 3-letter codes, properties, pKa values of side chains would be nice but not essential), glycolysis, gluconeogenesis, TCA cycle, oxidative phosphorylation, and the key steps of the pentose phosphate pathway, glycogen synthesis, beta oxidation, and lipid biosynthesis.
No, you do not need to "memorize" all the structures above. However, you should know the purpose of each pathway and why each step is carried out - especially in the central metabolic pathway of life: glycolysis --> TCA cycle --> oxidative phosphorylation. There is a chemical logic to each step and you should understand that. You should be so familiar with this that if I ask you what fumarase does and why it's necessary, you should immediately be able to answer. Again, you should seek understanding and not rote memorization. At the very least, you should be able to recognize the structures if they are given to you.
For this section particularly, Khan Academy practice passages are a great resource. There are a lot of data-driven passages on there that are excellent practice for the MCAT.
P/S
Ah, the new section. This section is perhaps the hardest to prepare for because prep companies have the least experience with it and the AAMC materials are currently limited. In my opinion, Kaplan does an excellent job introducing the key concepts and terminology of these disciplines that you need to know. For this section, you should be able to interpret all sorts of graphs and charts. Again, Khan Academy practice passages give you excellent practice in this area. When you see a chart or graph, you should immediately be able to pick out the most important things in the chart/graph and glean from it what the authors are trying to tell you with that data. Don't get bogged down in the details at the beginning - just look at the data and the general trends. This is where reading the scientific literature will come in handy.
On top of that, you also need to know basic psychology/sociology terminology. Taking intro-level courses in these disciplines may be a good idea for that and I know it helped me a little even though I took those courses years ago. But this is also where a lot of pre-meds fall into the trap of rote memorization vs. understanding. It's easy to take a bunch of flashcards and memorize the definition of every term on the AAMC lists. In fact, I would argue that even a monkey could do that. But that results in an inflexible vocabulary (functional fixedness, anyone?) - in other words, it's hard to apply these rigid definitions to new situations like you will encounter in passages. A better way to study is to try to grasp the main idea behind these terms. So you could go and memorize that cultural relativism is viewing another culture in terms of its own norms and mores. You could put that on a notecard, look at it every day, and have these words memorized verbatim by next week. But that doesn't mean you'll be able to apply it correctly come test day. So instead, you should know that the idea behind cultural relativism is that one is completely unbiased when judging another culture. So, "When a physician keeps insistently telling a patient that obesity is an illness despite the patient, always taught by her ethnic parents that obesity is personal choice, continually refusing to believe him/her, the physician has failed to observe which of the following? A) Linguistic relativity B) Ethnocentrism C) Cultural Relativism D) Assimilation."
Final Thoughts
If you've read all of this, you should realize that the MCAT is not something you can do well on if you start completely from scratch. Preparing for the MCAT, in a sense, begins at day one. You need to develop your scientific logic and reasoning skills as well as reading comprehension and verbal reasoning throughout your undergraduate studies and maintain those skills as you go along. If you do those things, scoring in that coveted 520+ range should not be a matter of luck but rather of techne.
As a direct consequence of the above, by the time you start studying, you should already have the requisite scientific reasoning skills to do well on the MCAT. Your main challenge should simply be to apply those skills to MCAT-style passages and timing.
I will continue adding to this and editing as more thoughts come to me.
Good luck on your studies!
Last edited:
? Thanks for answering and congrats on the amazing test 
