pcat prep materials besides collins and kaplan

[HuskerBluejay]

for what it's worth, I will share a few resources I used to prepare for the pcat I took yesterday. I don't plan on taking it again or visiting this forum again, so I'll share a few things before I move on. I had 3 months to prepare. I did not buy kaplan or collins. My composite was 93, mainly because both my verbal & rc were 94. I did not prepare for these two sections, they just came naturally to me. I have a bio degree but I got it 16 years ago. I had to re-learn algebra & calc and review everything else.

• I took 3 pearson practice tests, and I reviewed every problem and answer at least twice in the science/math sections. I paid a lot of attention to the wrong answers and figured out that you can usually narrow your choices down to 2 pretty easily. I learned that I needed to always look at the 4 answers before I tried to calculate anything because that way I would quickly see if rounding numbers would be okay or not, and it usually was.

• I got a couple sets of Great Course dvd's off of ebay. The human A&P videos were great. I also got Chemistry 2nd edition, which was rather basic, but it was a very good review for me and came with a workbook of problems. It was important to me to have a good understanding of the basics in chem & bio. Just like these chem dvd's, I also got the Algebra 1 set of videos, and I didn't watch most of them but I did all of the problems in the workbook. They also have algebra 2, and if you can find these cheap on ebay, I think they are worth it.

• I used Kahn academy extensively for review. What I liked about their videos is that they are short and organized clearly, so you can skip forward if it's boring. I like the practice problems they offer.

• I liked the Youtube channel called Crash Course biology for reviewing a lot of info. quickly, also their chemistry videos, they are funny and to-the-point.

• MIT open courseware was helpful for reviewing major concepts that I had forgotten. You can stream lectures from the MIT site linked here, or search for a similar topic in Youtube - I watched a few Berkeley videos there, example here.

And finally, Benchprep has an online PCAT study program that is free for 3 days, so 3 days before my test I signed up at Benchprep and scrolled through their list of lessons and clicked on the ones I thought would help me the most. Honestly, from what I saw, it was worth using free but I wouldn't pay for it. Hope this helps someone out there, especially if you're old like me.

---

Members don't see this ad.