MCat Study materials.. What's the best!?

[agent]

I'm starting some of my pre-reqs soon and I heard mcat study books are good for this in 2 ways: 1) they help you get a better understanding of the material and 2) thye help you prepare for the mcat.

So I've been looking through amazon.com for Mcat review books.

It appears the two big ones are Examcrackers and Kaplan.

Any suggestions?

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[Sweet Tea]

i used examkrackers more than kaplan to study the physical science part of the mcat. i hadn't had gen chem or physics in 5 years, and gen chem was never my strong point, so i had some catching up to do (i.e., relearning everything). i found the EK materials to be very helpful, and was happy with my mcat score. check out the mcat forum for more study guides but beware: some of these study guides will make very little sense if you've never been exposed to the subject before.

 

[agent]

yeah maybe a mod should move this to the mcat forum..

my bad.

 

[Tweetie_bird]

Lemme do that.

 

[Mike59]

MCAT review books are not too helpful in prereq classes beyond a very minimal understanding of concepts. If someone read only their MCAT books and took a University level Organic Chem test, they would bomb miserably.

For school, your texts are more appropriate.

For the MCAT, practice tests are most appropriate.

Good luck!

 

[limit]

Kaplan books belong in the realm of pure piffle. Stay away.

Examkrackers books definitely won't disappoint, start there.

 

[SuzyQ]

I really liked the PR books I got with the review course I took. Im not sure if you can buy those seperately but the science workbook filled with TONS of practice passages was really awesome.

 

[Random Access]

Originally posted by limit
Kaplan books belong in the realm of pure piffle. Stay away.

Examkrackers books definitely won't disappoint, start there.

The other thing about Kaplan...most people say that the class itself is somewhat useless, since you can read the book on your own. The real gem is all the practice tests...


-RA

 

[BushBaby]

Originally posted by SuzyQ
I really liked the PR books I got with the review course I took. Im not sure if you can buy those seperately but the science workbook filled with TONS of practice passages was really awesome.

The PR review books are great. I am not a big fan of their classes. I took PR twice. The first time I relied on the classes and I learned NADA. Second time, I read all the books and did ALOT of the workbook questions inaddition to reading with my college testbooks(going over the concepts that I still didn't really get).
I attended class but only to socialize My score improved the second time around but still not enough.

My friend in virginia took kaplan, she hardly went to class because after working all day she was just too tired. She just read over their course material and did questions at home.

I am taking EK this time around.