MCAT Verbal
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About the verbal:
it may be a good idea to take verbal section for practice just to see where you are at, then you know where you are at. As far as reading goes, spend time each week (Everyday is best) and read one or two articles (economist, humanities stuff) online or out of a text book that bore the crap out of you. The kind that are really hard for you to pay attention to. Read the article as quickly as you can once without rereading anything. Then, practice trying to figure out what the authors main idea was, what his/her opionion is, etc and then prove these things to be true. Go back and find 3 or 4 things that support the main idea and what the author thinks.
About physics:
I was in the same position as you. I had taken Calc 1 and 2 by the end of my freshman year. I was leaning toward calc based physics when a few of my premed friends and advisor advised me to go with trig based. They told me this for a couple of reasons: the trig based you learn all of the physics that will be on the MCAT and you learn the simplest/fastest way of solving the problems. You do not need a calc to solve the physis on the MCAT, in fact, it might just slow you down. KISS: keep it simple studid! haha... Also, another reason is that my schools calc based physics does not cover everything that is on the MCAT. After going through physics, I wish I would be able to still take the calc based because I think it would be interesting, but I am glad that I did things the way that I did.
it may be a good idea to take verbal section for practice just to see where you are at, then you know where you are at. As far as reading goes, spend time each week (Everyday is best) and read one or two articles (economist, humanities stuff) online or out of a text book that bore the crap out of you. The kind that are really hard for you to pay attention to. Read the article as quickly as you can once without rereading anything. Then, practice trying to figure out what the authors main idea was, what his/her opionion is, etc and then prove these things to be true. Go back and find 3 or 4 things that support the main idea and what the author thinks.
About physics:
I was in the same position as you. I had taken Calc 1 and 2 by the end of my freshman year. I was leaning toward calc based physics when a few of my premed friends and advisor advised me to go with trig based. They told me this for a couple of reasons: the trig based you learn all of the physics that will be on the MCAT and you learn the simplest/fastest way of solving the problems. You do not need a calc to solve the physis on the MCAT, in fact, it might just slow you down. KISS: keep it simple studid! haha... Also, another reason is that my schools calc based physics does not cover everything that is on the MCAT. After going through physics, I wish I would be able to still take the calc based because I think it would be interesting, but I am glad that I did things the way that I did.
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something to think about with the verbal depending on how far off your mcat is....there is only SO many practice verbal problems out there, practice tests etc. Then, when you look at those, there's only so many that people actually deem valid when compared with the real mcat (i.e., lots of people say Kaplan's verbal practice is too easy, therefore not that indicative of what you'd see on the real deal). You might take a practice full length to see if you're one of those people who's sub par in verbal and will have to improve your critical reading skills, one who's pretty good to go, or one of those who consistantly gets 12s because they're a natural at those reading comprehension skills.
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don't forget the OP-ED section of the NY times. these essays are similar to the verbal essays and it would be helpful to start becoming acustomed to reading and getting the gist of these type of writings.
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My biggest advice for the verbal section: don't look at a subsection question-by-question. A lot of the answers are based on different interpretations of the theme of the passage. So if you think that there was one main idea of the passage, there will be an answer in every question based on that perception (if you're right). I think a lot of people probably run into trouble because they waver in the gray area on interpretation; sometimes, a wrong answer will seem to make more sense than a right one, but it will be based on the wrong interpretation of the passage. So when you go through verbal passages, make concrete decisions about the main idea/purpose/bias of the passage, and then answer questions based on your decisions, not how good answers look.
It may sound weird for me to tell you to not always pick the answer that looks best, but it was the strategy that I used, and I rocked the verbal section, so it can't be completely wrong.
It may sound weird for me to tell you to not always pick the answer that looks best, but it was the strategy that I used, and I rocked the verbal section, so it can't be completely wrong.
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I have heard people say that calc-based was easier, which it could be. I'm not sure since I didn't take it. I can tell you thought that trig-based seemed quite easy compated to all the other pre-med classes (organic, biochem, etc). I think at my school the calc based was quite hard because there wasn't a good prof to teach it. The prof that used to do it could hardly speak english and constantly contradicted himself. So many people complained that he isn't the one doing it anymore. I do know physics makes a hell of lot mroe sense in light of calculus. Pretty much all trig based physics is memorizing formulas and applying them to problems.
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My physics was mildly calculus-based. We used calculus to see how things worked, and then the prof derived the formulas for us and we worked from there. The prof I had was fantastic, I would definitely say that the quality of the teacher can make physics either a good experience or a painful one. But I would agree with fun8stuff, I think physics was the easiest one of my science classes, and I even took the physics for engineers (i.e., people who are going to actually use physics, as opposed to biologists who learn it and forget about it as soon as possible).
