I've heard quite a few people say that they've done very well on the BS portion of the MCAT by more or less grinding it out in terms of memorization. They essentially claim that if you memorize every bit of information that you could need to know, you'll crush that section. Others, however, say that memorization played a relatively insignificant role in their prep, and that almost all of the information that you'll need to get answers right can be found in the passage. Any input on which of these strategies will prove more effective? I have plenty of time before I'm taking the MCAT, so I'm entirely willing to memorize everything if that will work, but I want to make sure that my prep is as efficient as possible, and don't want to waste time committing minutiae to memory if unnecessary.
Can the Biology/Biochemistry Section of the MCAT really be "beat" using memorization?
- Thread starter aalamruad
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That section throws alot of research data at you. Your job is to analyze and interpret as quickly as possible and choose the best answer. I am not so sure memorization would do much good there.
T
torontopharm
I don't think so. I felt like the most important skill for the Bio section was to be able to keep up with all the processes they throw at you. You have to be quick mentally processing sentences like "Enzyme X was activated after being phosphorylated by Enzyme Y, but only after Enzyme Z was first inactivated due to the presence of some other crap".
Do a ton of passages and get comfortable with Bio language in general..I'd suggest Khan Academy. For my test, Bio was by far the most "reading-comprehension"-y than PS and Psyc.
Do a ton of passages and get comfortable with Bio language in general..I'd suggest Khan Academy. For my test, Bio was by far the most "reading-comprehension"-y than PS and Psyc.
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Who are these people telling you this? This is so grossly incorrect that you should pretty much ignore anything else they have to say.
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When doing content review you have to memorize pathways and concepts of course. But afterwards you should do tons of practice problems to learn how to apply the content you learned. If you have plenty of time my suggestion is to learn the content and practice at the same time. So for example if you read a chapter on enzyme kinetics find resources afterwards that have enzyme kinetics practice problems.
