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deleted21595
I've been getting many questions from students who are retaking their MCATs and wondering how they should study. Most asked is whether it will hurt people that they remember material from their practice before. Here's one such question I received a couple of days ago:
We get this question all the time. In reality, do you really care whether you're subconsiously remembering things. Hell, that's the whole point. The idea is that if you can get all the questions correct without really remembering that "the answer to this one is C", then whether you've seen it before or not shouldn't matter.
Another thing you try to do to elevate your prep game is an old-school technique I throw at my students that we don't use as much anymore called post-phrasing. This is where you start a test, submit it blank, and go immediately into review mode. In the kaplan interface you can collapse the explanations so that you don't see them below the question (until you want to), but the right answers will be boxed in a green box.
This is where the fun starts. For every question, instead of deciding what the right answer is, try to figure out why each of the wrong answers are wrong (the pathologies). After that click on the show explanations link for the question, and see whether you think like a test maker... The more you practice this technique, the more you'll attain what I like to call the "beautiful mind" effect, wrong answers will start to pop out at you like Russell Crowe on 6 anti-depressants.
Hope this helps,
-A Kaplan person
We get this question all the time. In reality, do you really care whether you're subconsiously remembering things. Hell, that's the whole point. The idea is that if you can get all the questions correct without really remembering that "the answer to this one is C", then whether you've seen it before or not shouldn't matter.
Another thing you try to do to elevate your prep game is an old-school technique I throw at my students that we don't use as much anymore called post-phrasing. This is where you start a test, submit it blank, and go immediately into review mode. In the kaplan interface you can collapse the explanations so that you don't see them below the question (until you want to), but the right answers will be boxed in a green box.
This is where the fun starts. For every question, instead of deciding what the right answer is, try to figure out why each of the wrong answers are wrong (the pathologies). After that click on the show explanations link for the question, and see whether you think like a test maker... The more you practice this technique, the more you'll attain what I like to call the "beautiful mind" effect, wrong answers will start to pop out at you like Russell Crowe on 6 anti-depressants.
Hope this helps,
-A Kaplan person
