Salve,
I will be taking the MCAT during the Summer of 2016. I have been informed by various sources that I should develop a 200-300 hour study agenda, 3 months prior to taking the test. Seems reasonable; however, I think that it'd be more effective if I were to plan out a 1000 hour, year-long study course. After balanced calculations, it'd result in a 52 week program; consisting of 3.85 study hours per day for 5 days out of each week. I'd, of course, set-up an accumulative evaluation for the remaining 3 months prior to the MCAT.
Would you agree that this an authentic conception? Or am I being too pessimistic?
I just want to assure myself that I will produce a 40+ score...
Ciao.
There are MD's who have been practicing for years gone through the rigor of medical school and residency for whom if you allowed them to study for a month or two still wouldn't automatically just produce a 40+ score. At that kind of level of score one or two simple carless mistakes is everything.
Take a practice test(one of the old AAMC ones) and see how it goes. Where are your strengths and weaknesses? If your weakness is in content knowledge don't spend an entire year memorizing content true. However, if your weakness is in reading comprehension and reasoning abilities the way the MCAT asks of you then it is in your best interest to start "preparing" for the test by building up those skills.
The efficacy of reading outside passages to improve mcat reading comprehension is always debated but one of the main complaints is there is not enough time to really build up reading comprehension skills in 2 months of prep or so. That is true. But it becomes a more feasible task(if your goals are realistic) if you have 1-1.5 years of prep and continuously build up your reading comprehension skills by actively reading everyday. Many people recommend things like the Economist and that's fine but what you really want to do is read abstract passages in subjects you aren't comfortable with and which can be fair game on the MCAT. Reading anything dense you can about art, foreign cultures and traditions is one good idea to do with this. The more comfortable you are reading passages on things like these, the more you can build up some relative understanding of terminology and practice actively thinking about it and almost visualizing what you read, the less frazzled you'll be on test day when the AACM throws one of their infamous passages designed to throw people off their game(if you want a good example AAMC Practice Test 5 on Piccasso will show you this). For me the visualizing what I read techinque is something that really worked well and this became a lot easier for me after reading a bunch of passages on art, history and tradition even if whatever the AAMC throws about art or history isn't close to a specific subject I ever read about. It's not particularly high yield by itself. But improving reading comprehension if you are weak at isn't something where there are high yield techniques of improving it necessairly. You just have to be persistent and see what works for you.
As for the sciences, I really do recommend regardless of what your strengths and weaknesses are actively reading scientific publications in relevant fields such as biochem, genetics, physiology etc. The more comfortable you are reading about how techniques are used and how experiments are designed, you will be much better off on test day. Also extracting relevant info from scientific papers is a skill in itself and that is really something you need for this MCAT. You are going to be asked to interpret blots, PCR data, charts, stain data and the like on this new test; you want more familiarization with it beyond what you read in a Kaplan book.
At the end of the day like I said this is all about realizing your strengths and weaknesses. For thsi purpose an old AAMC test can be rather useful(the style of the MCAT questioning really hasn't changed as much as people think). If you find your weaknesses in reading comprehension, analysis skills and reasoning ability at the level demanded by the AAMC, the sooner you prep the better off you'll be. And as a general reminder preparing for the mcat and reading all these books often isn't about memorizing. It's about being familiar with every topic possible and having some background info and being comfortable with it so that when the AAMC throws a big passage on a topic on test day and asks you to analyze data you can comprehend what they are throwing at you faster by being familiar with the topic and have a better idea of how to interpret what they are telling you and what and what isn't a reasonable conclusion.
