It is very interesting to me that people would take the test straight away without serious time put into comprehensive content review. What was the rationale? I was and am under the impression that diagnostics are pointless until one has thoroughly gone through the entirety of the content to be tested. The reason is, quite simply, of course you will be lacking in several areas. Simultaneously, there is no way to determine that you are 100% perfect on a given sub-topic within a subject -- even if you happen to have gotten all questions on the practice test pertaining to said sub-topic correct. The only reason I could see doing this is for purposes of testing innate, "cold" knowledge, but again I don't see how this is useful whatsoever. What matters is how well we can study for this thing, not how prepared we happen to be without any study whatsoever. That is not how we will enter the real exam. Therefore, real test-taking conditions are not being adequately simulated here. On top of that, the official preparatory materials we've been provided with are sparse at best. I don't see why they should be used up so quickly, and again in a state that is not even remotely close to the state we will be in just before taking the exam.
The general habits of those in the 30+ thread (which is still relevant, as the exam has not changed its principle methods but rather the amount of certain content therein), particularly those with 35+, have been content review, then practice, then re-review of all information pertinent to incorrect answers (and in certain cases even going over WHY right answers were right), then practice, then review, then practice, then review.....
Content review doesn't have to end after the "content review" step of your study plan. That step is really just preliminary in the first place, and usually isn't in depth. I've seen individuals (mind you, only top scorers, all others are [forgive me for saying so] necessarily irrelevant as examples) who have broken up the content review into several steps -- a quick skim, a full read, and a re-read, before even practicing at all. I know you probably know this, but here is the main reason I'm saying it: you need to understand that post-content review (entirely done with it, that is), you're still in the infantile-intermediate stage of your study process. What's more, you are now able to actually test something -- that is, how you've retained the information you've learned thus far. When you are doing diagnostics with no previous content review (just what you happen to have kept with you along your studies, which is a generally spotty/imperfect understanding), you are testing how you've retained knowledge from your courses, some of which you haven't touched in a year or two. Testing that knowledge does absolutely nothing for you. You're still going to do content review anyway. Those things you've completely forgotten will be remembered, and those things you've remembered will be solidified. You will still come out of it weak in certain things, but that is the point where you absolutely need to know where you are weak -- you just studied something, but you didn't retain it. That is a problem that needs fixing. Studying something 3 semesters ago and not remembering it is not a problem.
These are some of my reasons for wanting to wait on the practice. But as I've already asked, I'd like to know the rationale of those that took it. I already understand you want to know what areas you are weak in, but again I am wondering how that matters at this point -- pre-content-review. It is already best practice to assume you are weak in everything, even those questions you got correct (some of which could have been entirely out of process of elimination 50/50 luck). Another point of view I've thought of, because I would think this way myself, is a fear perspective. One may be afraid to score quite badly after all of the hard work they've put into content review, so instead they want to get the shock of scoring badly immediately. This does two supposed things -- first, it kicks the person into shape, when they realize how terribly unprepared they are, and second, with the understanding that improvement will be made during content review (because all of that is yet to come), there is evidence that supports the idea that one should have hope. But again, I've already covered this point -- content review is the earliest stage of the study process. It's not guaranteed to get you scoring 30+ immediately. Practice and post-game-analysis (as they call it) is where the magic tends to happen. Check the successively posted scores of the individuals' practice tests on the 30+ thread for confirmation.
Naturally, though, I'm a twerp. I don't know the first thing about what I'm talking about, and my data is shoddy at best -- all I have to go on are personal anecdotes, which is lame from a data accuracy perspective. But apparently it's all I've got. Let me know if you've got some other, good ideas. I'm a supporter of the "shout it out and if it kind of makes sense we should do it because it might be just the thing we were looking for" approach that has led to the greatest discoveries/innovations of our generation. As of right now, I go off of what those who have been successful have told us - if they're not just random individuals (not premed, haven't actually taken the MCAT) super invested in derailing a pre-med's discovery of proper study methods for the MCAT. This is why I go off the aggregate homogeneous study methods -- quite a few of them would have to be lying to throw off the conclusions from the data, which is much more unlikely than just one or two indivudals lying (which is very possible).
