How do I imporove?

[SiakTiDoc]

With test day getting closer I wanted to get some opinions as to how to spend my last month studying.

I noticed when I was examining my FL I missed quite a bit of passage based questions, but did fine with discrete questions and stand alone questions (with a few hiccups here and there). While reviewing them I catch myself wondering how I missed some of those questions as I was able to do them answer them the second time around after reading the passage (un-timed).

I'm set to take an FL every Friday up until my Exam date in January, except the week before. Should I purchase an extra FL from another company?

My plan moving forward is to just work on doing passage problems after completing and reviewing an FL.
There are some topics I feel like I could review a bit more, but I'm not sure how to incorporate that in or if I should at all.
Any ideas?

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[Medical Muse]

The MCAT is all about learning how to apply the knowledge that you do have. The best way to see where you need to focus during your last month is to do practice passages/tests and then learn from your mistakes. You noted that you did fine with free-standing questions but made most of your errors with the passages. I interpret that as: you have the knowledge, but when it is provided in a different context, you struggle to apply it. My recommendation is to use the practice tests to point out your weak areas. Once you've identified them, do as many practice passages in those areas as you can. Take another practice test, and repeat the process for any persistent or new weak areas. Ultimately the goal is to focus your remaining time on your weaker areas and to keep the other areas fresh with weekly practice tests.

Good luck!

 

[SiakTiDoc]

@TBR_Doc Thanks for the advice!
I have been trouble applying the information, but I've also been having trouble adjusting my time in the science passages. How long should one take per passage? Is it comparable to CARS?
Also any recommendations on another FL to add (ie which company)?

 

[Medical Muse]

The science passages shouldn’t take as long as the CARS passages for a few reasons: there isn’t as much time per passage and there are free-standing questions; the material is usually a bit shorter; but most importantly, you have background knowledge which makes it easier to make connections between ideas in the science passages.

It’s hard to say how long to take per passage because some of them have 4 questions and others have 6 (and there are 15 free questions). I prefer to think in terms of time per question which comes out to (with my rounding down) slightly more than 90 seconds per question. Approaching it this way means you will run behind on some passages but make it up on the free-standing questions. Have you been having any issues with going over on time?

One other recommendation is to spend a few seconds after reading a question thinking about the answer you are looking for. This may help link the question to your knowledge and prevent the test writers from leading you astray.

I don’t have any good FL recommendations currently, but I’ll ask around. In general, my default is to refer students to the plan put forth by SN2ed. There might be some recommendations on that thread.


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[SiakTiDoc]

@TBR_Doc
Sometimes I do, mostly because I don't really have a good feel for timing during the science passages, I'm not too sure how much time to allocate for reading the passage and then questions. I'm rather slow when it comes to applied physics and chemistry questions, and Bio passages can be more convoluted than some of the CARS passages and it ends up eating a good chunk of my time trying to understand the results.
I do notice I have a tendency to feel like I'm running out of time and I end up rushing some passages in the middle to later find out I had about a minute or 2 to spare at the end.

I don't have this time problem in CARS or PHY/SOC though.

And thank you for the tip! That actually came in handy when I was reviewing my exams and there was couple questions I understood pretty easily till I read the answer choices which made me reconsider my thought process, which led to an incorrect answer.

 

[Medical Muse]

I’m happy to hear that the tip helped.

For the passages, keep practicing the areas you’ve identified as weaker. Just as for the questions, stop after you’ve read the passage and ask yourself what the study is really about. Sort of like the main idea for a CARS passage. The test is often designed to confuse you with genes or organisms or reactions you’ve never seen. Yet they will only ask you about concepts you know. If you apply what you know, I’m confident you will do well.


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[NextStepTutor_1]

Hi @SiakTiDoc -

One of the challenges in dealing w/ convoluted C/P & B/B passages is the danger of getting bogged down in irrelevant details. Ultimately, you want to try to cultivate a sense of what information in a passage is essential, versus which information is either (1) irrelevant background information or (2) details that you can consult as needed but don't need to focus on too much while reading. Experimental methods are a classic example: you want to understand what the researchers were trying to figure out, and ideally have a general sense of what they found, but if you get asked a question about the details of the setup, you can go back and consult the passage. So when you're reading it, and you start seeing those details, you can just say "OK, here's where the experimental details are, I can go back later if I need to."

To help develop this sense, I'd suggest two steps: (1) go back and do a postmortem of previous passages/sections and clearly identify which passage information you actually had to specifically use to answer questions, and (2) do some practice passages/sections where you either do not read the passage at all before doing the questions (I don't recommend this as an actual strategy for Test Day, but it can be a useful way of developing a sense for what you actually need to get from it) or skim through it very quickly. The purpose of suggestion (2) is not to totally transform your routine for eventual Test Day, but to sort of shake yourself up and get another perspective on how passage info feeds into questions.

Some passage-based questions will rely primarily on outside knowledge (what we call pseudodiscretes), and some require very specific bits of passage info that you can extract quickly, without a detailed understanding of the context. So not all questions will require you to understand or reason about the passage in depth -- which means that you want to be efficient about not getting too bogged down in irrelevant details. Also, a hard passage doesn't necessarily mean hard questions -- easy questions can be asked about a hard passage and vice versa.

A final thing to think about is ways to move through convoluted science passages more quickly. Many students don't like taking notes in general (which is fine), but using your scratch paper/whiteboard to jot down quick cause-and-effect relationships in biological/biochemical pathways can help you organize what you're reading and save time for questions like "If A upregulates B which downregulates C which is a precursor of D, how will inhibiting A affect levels of D?"

Hope this helps & best of luck!

 

[SiakTiDoc]

@NextStepTutor_1
Thanks for the advice!
Would it be better then to go straight into the questions vs starting of reading the passage? There are times where I tried answering those pseudo-discrete questions, but I'm not sure if it's just EK or TBR passages, but there are usually some "tweaks" that modify the experiment that alter how I'd tackle problem.

 

[NextStepTutor_1]

@NextStepTutor_1
Thanks for the advice!
Would it be better then to go straight into the questions vs starting of reading the passage? There are times where I tried answering those pseudo-discrete questions, but I'm not sure if it's just EK or TBR passages, but there are usually some "tweaks" that modify the experiment that alter how I'd tackle problem.

I don't generally recommend going straight into the questions as the actual technique that you use on Test Day. This works for some students, but it's pretty unusual in my experience. To clarify, you might want to do a few passages that way just as practice, with the goal of shaking your process up a little bit and helping get a better sense for the essential vs. inessential.