BS section has changed on MCAT, how can I prepare for them?

[mmckuin]

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Hey everyone,

A lot of people have said that the MCAT BS section is more analyzing experimental data, does anyone know a website or something like that, which has articles or papers to read that could help one in this section?

Thanks

 

[hookgrip]

Hey everyone,

A lot of people have said that the MCAT BS section is more analyzing experimental data, does anyone know a website or something like that, which has articles or papers to read that could help one in this section?

Thanks

Pubmed

 

[Hotshy]

There is journal articles/ experiments on the MCAT, but I would just say if you have good practice materials you should be fine.

Indeed the passages on the BS section of the MCAT are definitely experiments. But when it comes to answering questions, all you really need to know is a couple of tidbits from the whole convoluted mess. On my exam there was one passage with so many abbreviations and I had no idea what they were talking about at one point. Then I just sat back and relaxed for 20 seconds. All it took was to recognize one characteristic about those abbreviated things to be able to answer the questions correctly.

I guess my message is, like everything on the MCAT, it looks really complicated and impossible, but it just comes back to basic science and reasoning.

 

[ak21]

use berkeley review biology.

 

[Chrome19]

While reading research articles can help, the average good research paper is significantly more complicated than any MCAT BS passage. Reading research papers for the MCAT Biological Sciences is overkill in my opinion. It might be helpful to read the "News and Views" section in Nature and Science but even these are unnecessary.

A good number of experiments are usually described in textbooks, for example Campbell and Reece's Biology. Try to understand these experiments and don't gloss over them. It's always helpful to read the experimental techniques section of any MCAT review book and understand these techniques.

 

[mightymoose02]

use berkeley review biology.

+1 👍


I don't get why people are suggesting textbooks.

Any prep-book with practice passages should have quite a few graph/chart/table analysis passages. Just make sure you do all of them. TPR science workbook has a lot of them too.

 

[AACmd]

I guess my message is, like everything on the MCAT, it looks really complicated and impossible, but it just comes back to basic science and reasoning.

There were 3 passages on my last test where my brain felt like scrambled eggs by the time i finished the passage. I remember thinking there's no way they expect me to remember/understand all this within the allotted 7 min. Then I started trucking through the questions and quickly realized that i need to understand very little about the passage to answer them.

Don't get me wrong, there are a few questions here and there that are simply unanswerable with the given information and time frame. That is where the good test taker cuts his losses, guesses, and moves on.

 

[Donald Juan]

While reading research articles can help, the average good research paper is significantly more complicated than any MCAT BS passage. Reading research papers for the MCAT Biological Sciences is overkill

This is true...however, I find that reading a lot of research articles and getting used to viewing graphs and figures helped immensely with the BS section of the mcat. I'm not saying you should understand some of the most horribly complicated scientific journals, but I realized from doing research that when I was looking for references I would quickly skip to the figures and interpret them myself to see what the data presented, and that is a skill that the mcat tests.

Statistics and logic go hand-in-hand with your basic biological knowledge on the BS section of the mcat. You only learn these things from practice.