How are you using your MCAT Review Books?

[RosenkWill]

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I have recently begun my MCAT Prep journey for my May 2016 exam, and have a full collection of TPR Review and practice books at my disposal. After a preliminary skim through the section on the nervous and endocrine systems, it occurred to me that far too much bolded vocabulary is not coupled with distinct definitions/explanations. (I have picked up a couple of Kaplan and TBR review books as well, and this appears to be a universal trend). However, I really have a hard time seeing how the structure and function of an axon, for instance, can be understood from the two sentences written in these review books to the degree that will be required for an MCAT passage/question.

Thus, I wish to ask you all...

How are you using your review books to learn material/dust off mastery of old material?
Are you supplementing review books with your old textbooks, for instance?

Do any of you know of a good metric for measuring content knowledge, or does it just need to be felt out while doing practice passages? In other words, how should one know when they've read enough to actually then have a meaningful experience doing practice problems?

Thank you very much for your time and input. Good luck to you all!

 

[Phoodie]

I've been using EK for content review and TBR for practice passages.

What I've found is that content review will give me enough of an overview of what to expect during the passages. However, the learning doesn't stop at content review. Many of TBR's practice passages are extremely in-depth (beyond the scope of EK) and as a result, I learn a lot of small details while I go over the answers. If I run into something I simply didn't know/remember, I write it down. At the end of the day, all of the small details I need to memorize get thrown in my Anki deck. I've only just begun my studying but so far, I haven't had to reference any old notes/textbooks.

You should adjust your content review as necessary but don't sacrifice time set away for practice passages - they're incredibly important too!

 

[RosenkWill]

I understand. So I should expect to really get an indication of what I need to spend more time learning about, or just memorizing, while going through the practice passages. That makes sense. I'll just have to wait and see as I get through the TPR books over the next couple of weeks and gauge it afterward.

Thank you!