No reason to frown
@toriabliz...
, unless you are looking for a magic pill. If you're willing to work, it may be reassuring to know that about 98.345% (this is an exact figure) of my students feel the same way when they first attempt analysis of the new science-journal-excerpt-on-steroids MCAT passages. If you learned o-chem languge, if you've ever learned a second language, its pretty much the same thing. Most of those passages are using dense experimental language...they don't tell it like a story (sadly most practice passages do), they report it like you do in a published journal written to your PhD peers. It is NOT beyond you, you just have to practice it, and practice it, and practice it, until it gradually becomes more comfortable. Also remember...you need to be able to understand journal research anyway. A doctor who cannot read and understand primary literature is a very poor doctor--so you're going to have to develop this talent some day.
I see an analogy with how students do or do not learn O-chem. Many of my friends never "got" O-chem and always struggled. These same students struggled in biochem. But those who really put their head down and "learned the language" of O-chem (pushing electrons, acidity, basicity, nucleophilicity, etc.), finally
spoke the language. Biochem was then a somewhat different application, but they spoke the language so it wasn't too bad.
There's no magic trick for understanding a passage that cites six different signalling molecules in a single sentence and gives them each an acronym. There's really not too much to expound upon when it comes to "how" to understand that kind of sentence. You either become familiar and comfortable with dealing with acronym-heavy text, you get accustomed over time to patterns (e.g., noticing that in many cascades the patterns are similar, many of the actual signal molecules end up being the same too), or you don't practice and you don't.
The same is true of experimental logic and design generally. So many current MCAT questions are about experimental design. That graph cannot be understood simply by observing which bar is higher than the others, or even by simply noticing the statistical sig. markers. You have to understand why they would even set up the experiment to test those variables. Why would they use 16sRNA levels? What does that measure? What is the luciferase reporter doing? What is serving as the control? Is there a control? Those are the kinds of things that go through my head when I read that kind of passage, but that is NOT what is usually in my students' heads early on. I have my students do Altius and section bank passages over and over again; I force them to repeat the same passage until they can explain to me in perfect terms what is going on, why the experiment is set up that way, why the researchers did what they did, etc.
Funny thing...at first the questions are "so hard", but after they are able to completely own the experiment, the questions are pretty easy. Don't worry if it takes you an hour to get that kind of mastery of a science journal passage today, if you practice enough and DO NOT TAKE THE EXAM BEFORE YOU ARE READY (yeah, that was pretty much yelling...but for your benefit)...you'll get down to 2-3 minutes to do basically the same thing!
These are NOT magic bullets, but I will give you two simple pieces of advice.
1) Every time you see an acronym for a signalling molecule, gene, or gene product, CONVERT it into a mathematical symbol on your scratch paper--I mean an algorithm/flow-chart type representation. Each gene or molecule is ALWAYS doing something to another gene or molecule on the MCAT. Is it coding for a product, upregulating another gene, activating an enzyme allosterically, inhibiting another molecule, phosphorylating it...?? Get used to translating word-based relationships and cascades into little boxes, arrows and plus/minus signs.
2) Good Experimental Protocol: A) only change one variable at a time, B) include a control. That's like less than "Scientific Method 101"...but I'm floored at how often the right answer on the MCAT is the only case in which the proposed experiment changes only one variable, or the distractor is wrong because it suggests changing two variables simultaneously, or lacks any control. I think the AAMC is (correctly) driving home a point. You had better be able to at least understand basic scientific procedure if you want to be a doctor.
Help is out there my friend...hope is alive...and MCAT science passages can be owned and mastered!