mcat study

[honsano]

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this question may better be suited for the mcat room but here goes. when you guys began to study for the mcat did you seem to remember most the stuff, seeing as how you just took the courses, or did you see yourself having to relearn everything? i ask this because i fear taking the mcat in the spring because i don't think i will be able to remember all the stuff i learned since taking the classes to which the test pertains. so, i will not only have to relearn the material but take a full load of classes. what is your experience with remembering old material?

 

[Lactic Folly]

I took the August MCAT after second year, so didn't have to worry about final exams at the same time.. also had four months to study 🙂 It had been a year since I took the first year science courses, but the stuff came back without too much difficulty. If you did well in the classes when you took them, reviewing is much easier than learning from scratch (or relearning incorrectly learned material.. eeps). It is a lot of material though.. you have a better idea of how long-term your memory is than anyone else would 😉

 

[tBw]

The key really is - how well did you do the first time around with these subjects? If you got As then probably you at some point had a fairly good grasp on the subjects and understood the fundamentals. If you were scraping Cs then, in reality, you didn't understand them that well in the first place and you have a lot of learning to do.

In my opinion that will make more of a difference than when you took them (I am a non-trad and hadn't taken any physics for years when I took the MCAT - but I was a physics major because I had always done fairly well with that subject). Very few people are going to have finished Bio, Phys, O. chem and G. chem immediately prior to the MCAT (and at my school you had to take O. Chem after G. Chem so it pretty much had to be at least a year).

 

[avhart]

There was definitely stuff I had to re-learn...it had been three years since I had taken gen chem, so that stuff was slow to come back...and when I was taking physics, I just crammed for all the quizzes and tests, so I had to go back and re-learn some of that stuff. So, yeah, give yourself some time to re-learn stuff in case you need to...but most of it will be pretty easy to teach yourself, since at some point in time you did know it. I certainly found that the more recent classes I took (even though it was a year before the MCAT) I remembered pretty well.

Go Examkrackers, by the way. I studied on my own and did just fine thanks to those books.

 

[bella_dottoressa]

Lactic...
Hi! I'm planning on taking the mcat the august after my second year too...So did that work out pretty well for you?

 

[DarkChild]

worked pretty well for me 😉
i was working at a lab during the summer and i had plenty of time to study.

Originally posted by crystal18mc
Lactic...
Hi! I'm planning on taking the mcat the august after my second year too...So did that work out pretty well for you?

 

[Lactic Folly]

crystal18mc: Yep! I think it was a good idea, for the reasons listed above. I actually know people who took the MCAT the summer after first year and did pretty well.. the only thing I'd be concerned about is score expiration..

 

[gibna]

for those who took EK, was your verbal EK scores similar to the one you got on the real MCAT?

 

[avhart]

I did better on the real MCAT on verbal than on any practice stuff...but it was only one or two points higher than my best score. I like EK's verbal theory--it should be the easiest section because you don't need to KNOW anything, they give you all the answers, you just have to find them. 🙂

 

[avhart]

to prepare for the verbal, all I did was the main verbal book from EK and the practice MCATs from EK and AAMC. I thought these were about the same as the real MCAT, although score-wise I did a little better on the real thing. I took it when verbal was first and the top score was 13-15...but I felt well prepared, I just hated the science-based passages about astronomy and stuff. 🙂