Biological Sciences Section Best Practices (10+ scorers)?

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Hey guys

So I've been working and I've nearly gotten the PS and the Verbal sections down pat. I'm just having ridiculous amounts of trouble with the bio section

I'm not really sure how to go about approaching it

I honestly wasn't the best at Bio because I have a pretty bad memory. I'm good with logic/understanding stuff and I've really been treating Bio has a trivia game. I do try to understand it, but it slows me down based on the quantity of information out there

I'm just not entirely positive how to approach the section however

Everyone says that you need to know the least amount of information going in to do well on the BS section. Is this true? I've just been having trouble staying focused and thinking through things in this section somewhat. I feel like a lot of the questions are not relevant to the passage and require some outside information [at least so far from the Princeton Review book which is the first one I've started[

I was wondering what were your best practices for the BS section?

 

[DocMC]

It's hard to say because everyone is different. If I had a very detailed, pathway-oriented passage, I would always very briefly draw it out, and this always helped me get through the questions quicker since I did not have to refer back to the passage. As for everything else, I honestly just read it as fast as possible and answered the questions. I knew the bio book inside and out, but I also found that you did not need to know the content very well for bio, as most have said. For orgo, just understand the basics and you will be fine. I scored a 12.

 

[Qester]

I find videos help a lot for the bio section. They provide you with both a conceptual idea of what is going on as well as the material you need to memorize

 

[Like]

My recommendations:
Go here and click Biology Review. This is review of all the topics that are supposed to appear on the mcat (covers the entire AAMC list). Make sure you understand all of it.
http://mcat-review.org/

AAMC's list:
https://www.aamc.org/students/applying/mcat/preparing/

After that, all you need is practice.
1. All of the AAMC practice tests (R versions are more favorable due to more content)
2. TPR Workbook


I just took the mcat a week ago.

 

[Captain Sisko]

I'd say only 2-3 discretes are trivia, the rest are going to test either fairly common concepts, or with more difficult passages, challenge you to sort through, process, and analyse data. I'd say the best way to improve would be to practice. tbr had some great material, if i recall.

 

[PantherPride]

My recommendations:
Go here and click Biology Review. This is review of all the topics that are supposed to appear on the mcat (covers the entire AAMC list). Make sure you understand all of it.
http://mcat-review.org/

AAMC's list:
https://www.aamc.org/students/applying/mcat/preparing/

After that, all you need is practice.
1. All of the AAMC practice tests (R versions are more favorable due to more content)
2. TPR Workbook


I just took the mcat a week ago.

Does anyone know if the AAMC tests and their corresponding R tests have the same questions/passages

 

[MedOldAge]

Does anyone know if the AAMC tests and their corresponding R tests have the same questions/passages

Someone can jump in to correct if I am off.

My impression is as following:

1) R means older paper version. The R were the paper form of test which had more passages and questions than the current on line test. Therefore, the current 3,4,5,7 FLs are probably the shorter but identical version (subset) of R version.
2) Since 2007, AAMC changed to CBT online testing, the 7,8,9 highly likely do not have R version. If they did exist at one time, you seldom found them any more. The 10, 11 probably do not have R vesion at all.
3) Most common R version folks at SDN talked about are FL-R1,2,4,5,6 (may be 7).
4) You still can find R(3-7) pdf files from some folks who had them back to the good old days.
5) AAMC merged R-1,2,6 and mixed it up into Assessments (BS, PS and VB) as those now we use.Of course, we don't know how much AAMC pulled from the content of 1,2, 6 into the 3 packages of Assessments unless we can compare them side by side.

Hope that helps!