Ratio between time spent on content review vs. practice problems

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kehlsh

Medic Commando
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I want to ask all the fellow students who are preparing for or have already finished the MCAT.
What do you think is the effective ratio between the two variables 1. time spent on content reviewing 2. time spent on doing the problems?

I know that it varies from people to people. I just want to know what you guys have done/are doing! Any recommendations from high-scorers are encouraged! T.T
 
If you're looking for recommendations from high scorers then you better check out the 30+ thread.

I put 30:70 but it was probably closer to being between 25:75 to 20:80. I do think that some people need more content than others but as a general rule, you should spend AT LEAST 1.5 times doing and reviewing problems as you spend on reading the chapter. So, if it takes you 2 hours to read a chapter then you should spend at least 3 hours doing and reviewing passages. If you're not doing that then you either 1) don't have enough practice and/or 2) you're going through the passages/review of the passages too quickly. A breakdown of that is it took me about 20 mins to do each passage in TBR and I took about 7-9 mins per passage and 11-13 mins reviewing. It's weird because it came out to about 20 mins everything single time. A few times the passage was easy and I got all the questions right so it took me around 12 mins but that was rare. A lot of passages, even ones that I got all the questions correct in, I still spent 20 mins on because I wanted to make sure I got the questions right with the correct reasoning.

But yea, out of my many hours spent studying for this thing I'd say 25 out of a 100 went into reading review and 75 went into practice of some sort. But like I said earlier, everyone is different but you should never go above 40:60 ratio. Practice will ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS be the basis of preparation. Practice is how you get good at answering questions correctly. Look at it this way, you can read the books all you want but that won't guarantee you a 15 on each section, but doing tons and tons of practice will give you an exponentially better shot at it, especially for PS.

Also OP, I think there is already a thread exactly like this. Trying searching for it if you need more responses.

Hope this helps,

-LIS
 
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