Importance of Practice passages?

[csx]

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I keep hearing people say how important it is to do practice passages and I can see the importance. However, I also see a lot of people say that they wish they had done much more practice passages than they did content review. IIRC, one person said in retrospect (obviously he exaggerated) that they wished that they had spent 95% of their time doing practice rather than content review and I saw many people agreed with them.

what are your thoughts on this and can anyone I get iron out this rationale?

 

[Shipley231]

With content review, generally people spend a lot of unnecessary time on subjects they are comfortable with and not enough time on subjects that they struggle with. The whole idea of this test is to test your application of knowledge, by doing passages, you find out how well you can apply knowledge to questions. By analyzing the results, you can then go back and review your weaknesses as necessary. Not only does this help your weak content areas, but it gives you better practice with timing and familiarizes you with MCAT-style questions and passages, which is very valuable.

The only exception, in my opinion, is if you are VERY weak on certain areas of content, then you should hit the review books harder for those sections and do FSQs until you have a better understanding, then move onto passages.

 

[NextStepTutor_2]

The problem with biasing a study plan towards the content is the MCAT is not really a content test - it is primarily a critical thinking test. Even in terms of order, a big misconception about the MCAT is that you have to do content first and then practice tests at the end once you have the content down. If you don't start taking practice tests from the beginning, you don't build the MCAT-specific critical thinking you need. For the traditional applicant, an effective study plan is based around taking an AAMC as a diagnostic first and then continuing to regularly take them throughout content review. Consider this doable because most have seen all of this content at some point or another in a class and even if you still aren't totally comfortable with all of it, it builds your ability to access knowledge that you haven't seen in a while and reason things out. There is a lot of experience to be gained from the practice tests and this is best done early.

 

[bambam92]

The problem with biasing a study plan towards the content is the MCAT is not really a content test - it is primarily a critical thinking test. Even in terms of order, a big misconception about the MCAT is that you have to do content first and then practice tests at the end once you have the content down. If you don't start taking practice tests from the beginning, you don't build the MCAT-specific critical thinking you need. For the traditional applicant, an effective study plan is based around taking an AAMC as a diagnostic first and then continuing to regularly take them throughout content review. Consider this doable because most have seen all of this content at some point or another in a class and even if you still aren't totally comfortable with all of it, it builds your ability to access knowledge that you haven't seen in a while and reason things out. There is a lot of experience to be gained from the practice tests and this is best done early.

This sounds like terrible idea. The typical person has a diagnostic in the low 20's (myself included) so you are advising to just burn thru AAMC's from the beginning, what if person fries all the AAMC's before they are even breaking 30?! Then they are screwed cause they have no valid or reliable indicator for what they will score on the actual exam. Cant retake them, scores will be inflated. If you said take third party FL's instead of AAMC I could maybe understand your logic, but rifling thru valuable AAMC's at the beginning and throughout content review seems ill advised.

 

[lNVlNClBLE]

This sounds like terrible idea. The typical person has a diagnostic in the low 20's (myself included) so you are advising to just burn thru AAMC's from the beginning, what if person fries all the AAMC's before they are even breaking 30?! Then they are screwed cause they have no valid or reliable indicator for what they will score on the actual exam. Cant retake them, scores will be inflated. If you said take third party FL's instead of AAMC I could maybe understand your logic, but rifling thru valuable AAMC's at the beginning and throughout content review seems ill advised.

He didn't say burn through them all at the beginning though. An initial exam followed by like 2 other FLs during content review will really help you pinpoint what you do and don't know, and then you'll still have plenty of FLs and other resources after you've finished content review.

I wish I would've done it. I did all my FLs at the end.