Has anyone used the Kaplan mcat Qbank recently? A friend of mine told me great things about it, but online I see quite a few negative comments about the qbank.Please let me know.Thanks
I used it last year, along with the Kaplan MCAT course, and wasn't really crazy about it. I opted for the service because fellow students in my postbacc program really liked it, but I'm not sure what they saw in it that I didn't.
These were my beefs with Qbank:
1. If you want to practice in a specific area (say physics), the number of available questions in the bank is pretty limited, so you can exhaust them fairly quickly. Meanwhile, you are still paying for many questions in areas that you DON'T need to practice in, and will never use.
2. A lot of the problems are VERY hard (harder than the real MCAT), and well-nigh impossible to finish in the time limits they give you. This can be more discouraging than helpful.
3. The software that Qbank uses to assemble the tests is very inflexible, making it hard for the student to make the best use of the available questions. There are only 2 choices: "reuse questions" that you have already seen or "don't reuse." But if you take a quiz and don't get to a question before time expires (a common problem--see #2 above), this question is counted as "seen" and won't appear on future tests. The only way to get around this is to agree to reusing questions, in which case you'll get tons of repeated questions you HAVE already completed. This is a waste of your time and gives you an artificially high score.
4. Once you have taken a test, it can be cumbersome to see your score and go back to the questions to see the correct answers. Sometimes the software malfunctions, and you can't actually get to some of the questions.
So, as you can see, I didn't think this was really worth the money.
