Dr Collins material - how to study?

This forum made possible through the generous support of SDN members, donors, and sponsors. Thank you.
Get help with your application

Use all the free resources available to you from SDN: articles, guides, expert advising, forums discussions, and school research.

seekfinelines

Full Member
10+ Year Member
Advertisement - Members don't see this ad
So just received Dr Collins study materials. Can anyone tell me how they actually studied for this? It would be really nice to know. Thanks in advance. 🙂
 
If anything, at the very least, do the chemistry section and the practice tests for it. The section briefly covers just about everything you'll need to know for it and the practice test questions are almost spot on with what you'll see on the PCAT. The organic chemistry section was alright (imo) and you really will be tested on the stuff you learned in organic 1. Study Collins chemistry, know and understand the concepts both inside and out and you're golden for this section.

For the biology section, I did not have September's big bio update and apparently there was a lot of great stuff in that. What I did was look at the physiology/general bio/biochem notes for Collins and treat it as a skeleton. I did not study much for this section at all because I had already taken physio, bio and biochem recently; I pretty much just looked at past lecture notes for review. For the Collins bio tests, I only answered the questions that related to human biology/physio/biochem as well as the microbio ones. I forgot to say earlier that since I hadn't taken microbio, I had to do a little bit of self-studying for that.

The QA section is probably the most stressful section on the PCAT. I'm being serious when I say that you really have to know how to take a standardized test as much as knowing how to do lightning-fast mental math. 40 minutes is not very much time when you have to complete 48 math problems and it gets even more hectic when there is calculus involved. Time is absolutely precious and the more time you're hung up on problem 22, the bigger the hole you're digging yourself into. With Collins QA, I merely tried to do the problems as fast as possible (i.e. 5 seconds or less).

With respect to VA and RC, I did not study for these sections at all. For me, it was not time-efficient to study 100+ words and end up seeing only about 5, at worst none, on the test. If I would have studied for VA, I would have most likely learned word roots instead because you can at least piece together an idea of what an unfamiliar word means by looking at its roots. For RC, I didn't study because I suck at reading comprehension. I can't become the next Shakespeare in 3 months or probably even a year. It's very difficult, imo, to improve in RC unless if you've enjoyed reading for an extended period of time.

My PCAT stats are below. Granted I'm not a 99 composite, but I hope my scores somewhat give what I just typed up some credibility. Good luck!

VA - 409/63
Bio - 434/91
RC - 402/54
QA - 423/85
Chem - 455/98

Composite 425/91