please help - mcat technique question

[scarlett14]

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im taking the mcat in a week on june 20th and ive been working on content for quite a while now and i stupidly only left myself about 2 weeks to work on practice tests (though i had been doing practice questions during my content review).

i am more or less good with the content but i am finding that i keep making silly or stupid mistakes nonetheless either bc of a calculation error (usually the ps section) or because im not really thinking and interpreting the question the way they want you to (this mostly applies to verbal and bio passages).

i only have about a week left to practice and im planning on doing a few practice exams in the next couple of days but any advice at all on how to improve my score would be much appreciated! Im just not sure what to do because it's obviously not a content problem and it seems to be more of a concentration and experience-with-the-problems issue, which cannot really be completely solved in a week so I am somewhat panicking...

sorry for the really long post but any advice at all would be much appreciated! ive perused the previous mcat threads for study advice but i wanted to ask anyway just in case anyone wanted to throw some ideas at me 😕

 

[battousai]

Unfortunately, there isn't a shortcut to taking the MCAT; you have to do a lot of problems to familiarize yourself with question types and get a feel on how the questions have to be approached. If you're not scoring in the range you want to be, I would suggest rescheduling.

As far as what's worked for me, I make sure to read a question twice if I didn't get a sense of what topics it dealt with during my first read.

For verbal, take a five second break before each passage (this is from audio osmosis, and it really helped me)

 

[Noggin]

im taking the mcat in a week on june 20th and ive been working on content for quite a while now and i stupidly only left myself about 2 weeks to work on practice tests (though i had been doing practice questions during my content review).

i am more or less good with the content but i am finding that i keep making silly or stupid mistakes nonetheless either bc of a calculation error (usually the ps section) or because im not really thinking and interpreting the question the way they want you to (this mostly applies to verbal and bio passages).

i only have about a week left to practice and im planning on doing a few practice exams in the next couple of days but any advice at all on how to improve my score would be much appreciated! Im just not sure what to do because it's obviously not a content problem and it seems to be more of a concentration and experience-with-the-problems issue, which cannot really be completely solved in a week so I am somewhat panicking...

sorry for the really long post but any advice at all would be much appreciated! ive perused the previous mcat threads for study advice but i wanted to ask anyway just in case anyone wanted to throw some ideas at me 😕

It's very simple. Take a few AAMC practice exams in the next couple of days. If you score in the 30s then you are ready to take the real thing. If not, then you should post-pone your exam.

 

[SaintJude]

Buy or lend the official MCAT book from AMCAS in library. They have specific guidelines and tips on deciphering language behind practice question.

Following through the logic from the test makers helped me immediately.