Hey!
I'm trying to transfer schools, and the school I'm trying to get into wants my board scores before I start July 1. My finals are the 2nd week of May, so with score reports taking 3-4 weeks to be sent out, it looks like I'll only have about 3 weeks to study.
I need a solid review of the sciences (especially Biochem) for the Boards, and I was wondering if anyone had done well (>220) using the Princeton Review online course/materials. Their website says that it will take 3 weeks to 10 weeks to complete it, but I don't want to devote my entire 3 weeks to something without some feedback from you guys. I used Princeton Review and Kaplan for the MCATS and really liked Princeton Review much better (and improved my score by 8 points).
Thanks so much! You guys give great advice 🙂 Have a great day! 😍
Well, here's the issue -- you plan to devote about half the time most folks will spend on board review and yet you are hoping to do better than half of all students -- as PeepShowJohnny was suggesting, I don't think the math usually works out that way. Most will spend closer to 5-6 weeks on board review and the average still is only 218. I've gotta think that the less time you spend, the harder the odds of being average, let alone breaking it. But a lot depends on what kind of student you were in med school, and how much of the board review will be "review" and how much will be learning. If you aced things in med school, have no major areas of weakness, and are ready to put in intense 14 hour days for the three weeks, then maybe you can knock the casing off of this test. I know someone who honored everything in med school and got away with a very short board review period and a good score, but most of the other people I know who cut their study time short didn't seem to fare nearly as well.
Princeton Review is not a major board review player at this point (based on this board and word of mouth from med students at a handful of schools), so I'd worry whether they have enough of a track record for you to feel confident they are accurately focused. Also when someplace says their materials take 3-10 weeks to do, they generally mean something in the middle, not the low outlier. Other companies that offer crash courses frequently require more than 3 weeks. The Kaplan center prep tapes and online lecture stuff is pretty good, but not really consolidated enough to get through much of in a mere 3 weeks, but if you had a specific weakness (eg pharm, path, biochem), you might be able to get through one or two of those subjects in that time interval.
Also bear in mind that most people will do thousands of qbank/world problems before the test
on top of whatever reading/online/video course they may use, which you will likely only get to do a fraction of in 3 weeks. And that unlike the MCAT, where studies support the notion that folks with review courses do better than those that don't, the same statistic hasn't been borne out by board review courses (at least according to many med schools which dissuade their students from spending the money). So many schools create study schedules for their students and suggest they do it on their own -- via reading and qbank/world, rather than dump a couple of grand on a course that hasn't been proven to boost scores. I personally think that those courses are nice add ons if you have the time, but I'm not sure you have the time.
So I guess what I'm saying is, if 3 weeks is all you've got, plan to work pretty intensely, pausing only to eat and sleep, don't burn your time on unproven review courses unless you know folks at your school who have had success with that particular one, plan to do a ton of problems each day along with reading, and don't feel dashed when you don't score better than most of the folks who are devoting a whole 6 weeks as compared to your three. You do what you can do. Good luck.
