help! Content review is taking me too long

[owala]

Background: I just started studying for the MCAT and planned to complete 8 Kaplan Chapters per week (over 4 days). I use one day as MCAT FL/ practice question, another day to review the FL, and want to take one day off to avoid burnout. I will be taking the exam May 11th and want to be done with content review by the 1st week of April to use the last month for FL exams and review exclusively. I've done generally well in all of my prerequisites and have a strong sGPA. I took a NS Diagnostic before starting and got a 501.

My issue is that I take too much time to get through Kaplan chapters and I don't know what I'm doing wrong or how I can try to speed up while still retaining anything. I don't remember everything from general biology or chem or any of the classes I took because it's impossible to remember that level of detail years after. For each chapter I just read through, complete the discrete questions, compete an ANKI deck made by someone else, and annotate the AAMC guide. It takes me 4 hours to get through each chapters and I had initially hoped to dedicate 2 hours per chapter. What am I doing wrong and how should I adjust my study plan because I'm feeling really frustrated with myself and discouraged because I can't get through chapters faster to stick to my original study plan.

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[Ad2b]

I don't know that you're doing anything wrong; I'm taking my time plowing through a chapter of two or three sciences each day and then one CARS passage. It takes time. for me, I'm worried less about time it takes and more about making sure that any discretes that show up on actual exam are one and done... content knowledge does that.

Also learned something worthwhile in doing so: box and whisker plots - yep, never had seen them before the actual MCAT and now, I actually know how to handle. If I'd have tried to push my way through, I don't think I'd be confident with them. am now!

Sunday I spent a good 4-5 hours between physics and research methods + a little gen chem... yesterday a few hours on gen chem and orgo, reviewed notes from day before; tonight it'll be physics and orgo + some review of research methods.

It IS painstakingly slow but I think the first time around, I skimmed to try and get through and then when the chips were down and "insert stuff" happened, my knowledge wasn't sufficient to get me through.

 

[TheRealCookieMonster]

STAHP!
Content review is a huge waste of time...
I would modify your strategy right now and just focus on doing practice questions and FL tests. NOTHING else. All the "content review" you need in is the explanations and subsequent Google searching you do after you get a question wrong. If you did fine on your prereqs and they weren't 5 years ago it will come back as you work through problems. 0 hours on chapters.

 

[Ad2b]

If you did fine on your prereqs and they weren't 5 years ago

Agree 100% with you on that. Mine were some time ago so for me, the plowing through chapters makes sense. For others, as you said, could be huge waste of time.

 

[TheRealCookieMonster]

If it was a long time ago and you do need to have the whole thing reintroduced. The Khan academy has everything you would need to "review". It's like 30 days worth of 8hrs/day. And even that is over doing it imo. But if you're really more of a book worm and you have 8 months to put into the test I suppose I'll concede my radical opinion that # of questions completed and reviewed is the only thing that really matters for your score.

 

[Ad2b]

Cookie, I think everyone has to do their own thing; since I've been down this road and voided and scored the real deal, plus taken a full 1.5 years to fully evaluate to quit or not, my path is right for me.

Khan, for me, is to reinforce something or CARS. I can't listen to people yack at me all day at work and then listen to videos at night - too much talking makes my

I need to do math, and draw diagrams and write out mechanisms; it clears my head of the "well what if our testing plans don't correlate to the exact business process of the other 20 companies and what if we don't have 20,000 people sign off on LOA agreements for A/P so that we can control how much money is spent on miscellaneous vendors and oh, by the way, we don't have an E2E environment ready for your team because the UAT team from the other country is using the box that it sits on and we cannot just repurpose that box until they go live which may or may not impact your go-live date which means your resources may have to use other platforms to prove out the system works as expected but if that doesn't work then you have to figure out how much the spend is on an abacus and then use logs to figure out the real math and the interfaces and did you know Biztalk doesn't talk to Informatica?"

 

[Lawpy]

Background: I just started studying for the MCAT and planned to complete 8 Kaplan Chapters per week (over 4 days). I use one day as MCAT FL/ practice question, another day to review the FL, and want to take one day off to avoid burnout. I will be taking the exam May 11th and want to be done with content review by the 1st week of April to use the last month for FL exams and review exclusively. I've done generally well in all of my prerequisites and have a strong sGPA. I took a NS Diagnostic before starting and got a 501.

My issue is that I take too much time to get through Kaplan chapters and I don't know what I'm doing wrong or how I can try to speed up while still retaining anything. I don't remember everything from general biology or chem or any of the classes I took because it's impossible to remember that level of detail years after. For each chapter I just read through, complete the discrete questions, compete an ANKI deck made by someone else, and annotate the AAMC guide. It takes me 4 hours to get through each chapters and I had initially hoped to dedicate 2 hours per chapter. What am I doing wrong and how should I adjust my study plan because I'm feeling really frustrated with myself and discouraged because I can't get through chapters faster to stick to my original study plan.

Active learning is essential. My method is to focus all my effort on practice passages and understand the reasoning behind the answers. The key to excelling on the exam is having strong test taking and reasoning skills. Doing a lot of passages and practice problems and actively reviewing my answers helps me have a much stronger grasp and mastery of content knowledge which would’ve otherwise been difficult to achieve from just passively reading the chapters.

There are many sources for practice passages. ExamKrackers, Berkley Review and UWorld have lots of excellent passages for solid practice.

 

[BerkReviewTeach]

Active learning is essential. My method is to focus all my effort on practice passages and understand the reasoning behind the answers. The key to excelling on the exam is having strong test taking and reasoning skills. Doing a lot of passages and practice problems and actively reviewing my answers helps me have a much stronger grasp and mastery of content knowledge which would’ve otherwise been difficult to achieve from just passively reading the chapters.

THIS!!!!!!!!!

The key to preparing for the MCAT is active learning! For the last ten years or more at SDN the message reiterated time and again by the people who really got what the MCAT was about was that you learn by doing practice questions under strict timed conditions followed by a painstakingly slow and methodical evaluation of EVERY question, whether you got it right or wrong.

If you got it right, did you do it in a way you could repeat? What part of the question could they change and would you still get it right? Did you answer it efficiently, optimizing your timing?

If you got it wrong, why? Was it a careless error, and is it a typical careless error for you? Are you lacking the information base? Did you misinterpret the question?

These are absolutely essential things to do following every question. If you find you are lacking content, then go back and fill in that gap before trying the next passage. Let passages be your guide in terms of what content you need to review. Treat them as a diagnostic tool for measuring your test skills and knowledge.

Starting with full blown content review will make you feel good about yourself and you'll get this wonderful feeling that you are studying and growing and getting ready. Be leery, because it can give you a false sense of security about how well you know something. It's also not the best investment of your time, because well over half of what you review is stuff you already know. That's wasted time that could have been spent practice passages.

Preparing for the MCAT is like working out in so many ways. Going through the motions of passive reading is like going on a treadmill and never pushing yourself. You will feel better in both cases, but you have not gotten as much out of the experience, because you didn't give your all. You have to do passages and questions, and push yourself if you want to see the biggest improvements.

 

[owala]

I really appreciate the advice! I'm just really worried that I'm going to have serious gaps in content for things like discrete questions. Active strategies like ANKI decks work really well for me but I feel hesitant to completely skip reviewing material.I've done well in all my prerequisites but I really feel like I haven't retained much. For context, i've taken those classes over the past 2.5 years (with AP Bio my senior year of high school). I often cram for exams and feel like I would only do well because I could adapt to the way the professor formatted exams rather than a really strong understanding of the material which is why I am worried for the MCAT.

I was hoping to incorporate more active learning by doing one practice test per week up until my exam and have planned for 13 exams while reading all the chapters from kaplan. I think what I may do now is go through ANKI decks for each chapter and refer to the book if I feel I am missing a foundational concept. Do you think that is a good way to adapt my strategy?

 

[TheRealCookieMonster]

Do you think that is a good way to adapt my strategy?

That depends... How many questions do you plan on completing? What's your score goal?

 

[owala]

That depends... How many questions do you plan on completing? What's your score goal?

So I found a set of someone else's ANKI decks from Reddit and they have anywhere from 60-120 cards per chapter. I plan to do 13 FL exams (a few from kaplan, Next step and then the last month focus on AAMC material exclusively including the question banks.) I also do daily jack westin to practice cars but that's more of a strength for me while Physics and General Chemistry are weaker areas!

My goal is a bare minimum of 510 but ideally I want a 515!

 

[TheRealCookieMonster]

That seems reasonable for a 510-515. If I were you I would really take one of your AAMC tests half way through to check your progress. They are very accurate at giving you your current score range. NS is meh... imo. 515 is pretty aggressive, but I would see where that AAMC FL takes you.
I'll leave you with this

I feel hesitant to completely skip reviewing material

This seems to be a very prevalent anxiety. I felt the same way... so do many people. It goes against all the lecture and textbook based tests you have ever taken. "Use the force"

My method is to focus all my effort on practice passages and understand the reasoning behind the answers.

<-- This is really all you need to do
Good Luck dudess!

 

[northwestmedic]

i would say this.......

if you don't remember much of the info, then you need much more time to study. probably no substitute for this.

but my guess is that you know more of the info than you are giving yourself credit.... but you can easily study on at least two different tracks. go through chapters as you are but photocopy the summaries from all the chapters and also study that way. i think alot will come back to you from skimming many chapters summaries every day.

i was skeptical myself but people are completely right about doing practice Q's far more than content review AND using khan academy for tough subjects such as the biology core early chapters.

also, anything that is really important and is difficult, don't be shy about finding other sources of info. like schaum or AP (where applciable)

 

[northwestmedic]

i should mention IB has really good books for chemistry and physics. sort of like EK but much better explained (of course IB doesn't mirror the MCAT content completely...... for chem and physics it probably tracks at least 80% though)

IB biology doesn't track the MCAT content that well but i'll probably give it a try as i think it'll will be good for cells/dna/etc. (which to me is by far the most important MCAT section)

 

[Swagster]

Passages!!!

I was out of school for a while when I took the MCAT my last sitting and was able to prepare well doing passages and a thorough postgame analysis. Spend your time where it benefits you the most! The only reading you need to do are answer explanations, which will serve as content review where you need it most.

 

[Ad2b]

Passages!!! I was out of school for a while when I took the MCAT my last sitting and was able to prepare well doing passages and a thorough postgame analysis. Spend your time where it benefits you the most! The only reading you need to do are answer explanations, which will serve as content review where you need it most.

How's your app cycle going, Swag? I see you've taken the MCAT a couple of times (old one and the 2015). Are you apping this cycle?

 

[PlsLetMeIn21]

Jump straight to passages. You learn more that way. If you don't know something, then you'll figure it out reading the answer explanations. If you still need help, then you go to content review or videos. Review stuff you already know is not using your time wisely.

 

[northwestmedic]

i will add this........ if you've taken the subject university course, i don't see a huge need to start with a detailed content review.

i would start with looking through the chapter summaries over and over again.

then dive into questions for simpler things and khan academy videos for more complex things.

then during this period, do a focused content review..........

if you haven't done the course, then this advice doesn't hold, but it's not that far off from what i'd suggest anyway... nice thing about biology, chem and physics is that most people have done it in high school and frankly university content isn't that more advanced than AP (or maybe it's similar)

OC and biochem, many people wont have taken

 

[Swagster]

How's your app cycle going, Swag? I see you've taken the MCAT a couple of times (old one and the 2015). Are you apping this cycle?

To be completely honest, terrible. This upcoming cycle has to be better. But that is a story for a different forum.

 

[oncotraum]

I had the same issue as you when I was doing content review for the MCAT. It wasn't until one month before my test that I realized the AAMC has a guide that has topic lists for every section. I wish I knew this sooner, because I think going through that list and being comfortable with those topics at a basic level should be a priority, and then start doing practice questions to see how each topic is tested. I wasted a lot of time in content review going in depth on topics that were tested on a surface level basis.