What is your opinion regarding the MCAT? Would I be best prepared for the exam by memorizing every single detail presented by EK (for example, the different parts of the kidney) or by getting a more conceptual understanding (like how things work)? I want to know what the best way to study would be (besides taking the AAMC exams) since I have less than 2 weeks left to prepare.
Thanks for the help!
Just my opinion from taking all of the AAMC's:
PS: mostly memorization, and the passages don't help too much except for finding values for your formulas. I guess some people can conceptualize sound/light waves but that's another memorization thing for me.
VR: luck, not losing attention...???...my weakest area
BS: I think for organic memorization helps a lot, but you also need to be able to convert a written chemical into it's image, drawing it out. For the true biology stuff, it just helps to understand the language, but it doesn't help as far as putting things together to answer questions. I guess understanding the language is like memorization and will help you understand the passage. I'm in pharm school so I might have been so saturated with some stuff that i have it memorized but don't think about it, like physio stuff. I don't buy the mapping kaplan strategy, but I do map bs passages with arrows and abbreviations.
But understanding concepts is much better than memorizing phrases. I don't know what exactly you are trying to memorize about the kidney. If it was "reabsorption occurs where?" Think where should it be absorbed. Do you want good stuff like glucose getting close the the exit in the distal tubule? No, of course not, you want to reabsorb that valuable fuel as soon as possible in the proximal tubule. For that example, the language that needed to be understood was proximal and distal. And true, it is much more complicated than that, with different cell types, pressures, transport mechanisms, etc etc...but you will learn all about that in med school, and it won't be on mcat.
My ranges aamc 7-10 = (11-14ps, 9-12vr, 11-12bs), 34 avg
And you mentioned EK which is my test prep. I have used the cd's and the manuals (not 1001/101). If you can memorize all of their stuff it will carry you to 10+ in bs and ps, should be good for 9+ in vr, just saying because that is really an individual thing. I wouldn't spend too much time trying to memorize their optics page though, "eye am + that real is inverted" did help me today though on aamc 10. Anyways I don't know how helpful this was, just my subjective feelings.
To sum up, you need to memorize and understand concepts, so
both, depending on the section.
