Analyzing your Errors vs. Everything else

[ilovemcat]

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I'm just a little curious as to how people spend their study time (when doing passages / practice problems). It seems like I'm going at an extremely slow pace and at this rate, I won't have much time to utilize all the study materials I purchased.

Basically what I'm doing is reviewing all the answers I got incorrect so that I can understand how to avoid them in the future. But I'm also reviewing solutions to every single problem I got correct to make sure my logic was right.

I noticed this is very time consuming. I was just curious, do you review every problem you do, or only focus on those that you're unsure about / got wrong?

Thanks.

 

[upchurch]

I review every single problem but I focus more on the problems that I wasn't sure about. It is pretty cumbersome but you do a lot of learning while you are going over your mistakes. It takes the same amount of time to review as to take a practice test, sometimes even more...

 

[Dharma]

I review every single problem but I focus more on the problems that I wasn't sure about. It is pretty cumbersome but you do a lot of learning while you are going over your mistakes. It takes the same amount of time to review as to take a practice test, sometimes even more...

I have to agree. It usually takes more time to go over my passages and tests during the post-game analysis, but I feel this is where most of my learning takes place. I say go over EVERYTHING. Of course, there are the questions that will take all of 5 seconds to review because they are those gimme questions. ("which of the following hormones will be released in response to high blood glucose levels?"). I would say that it definitely takes me longer to review my tests/passages than it does to take them. That said, it doesn't take 3x as long as, for the most part. Passages in areas I consider to be my "weak spots" maybe 2.5x, mostly <2x the time.

Keep on trudging through. I know you don't love the MCAT any longer. She's a *****.

 

[Rabolisk]

I would generally go over any question that I got wrong, plus any question that I marked but got right. I would mark questions that I couldn't answer for sure. Usually the overwhelming majority of the questions weren't marked or wrong, especially close to the actual exam date.

BTW, I feel like you've been preparing for the MCAT for a long time now, ilovemcat.

 

[ilovemcat]

I would generally go over any question that I got wrong, plus any question that I marked but got right. I would mark questions that I couldn't answer for sure. Usually the overwhelming majority of the questions weren't marked or wrong, especially close to the actual exam date.

BTW, I feel like you've been preparing for the MCAT for a long time now, ilovemcat.

Yeah, I know man. It sucks! I took the MCAT last July but a technical error resulted in lost time & me ultimately voiding. I never had a chance to retake last year and now I'm stuck having to re-learn everything that was forgotten (which is pretty much everything).

 

[Perkins]

I started out reviewing all the questions, then switched to only reviewing what I missed because it took too long. But now I'm back to reviewing everything. I feel like I learn from questions I got right too, because sometimes the reasoning for why it is right differs from my reasoning when I got it right, but granted these cases are usually fairly slight (maybe 2-3 questions on the whole practice test) because I tend to miss stuff if I didn't know how to reason through it.

when you review do you write stuff down (ie why you got it right?) If you do this for every problem you did right and wrong I could see why that might take you a while. Usually I only write stuff down for every question on the VR. Then on science sections I just focus on what I got wrong and only write down what I got wrong. This saves some time and it takes me way less time to review the science sections than to review the VR section.

hope this helps!