test taking skills vs. content knowledge

[prepod2016]

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in going through the section banks, I realized that I used an OVERWHELMING LARGE amount of effort more in using the details of the passage to answering questions than memorized knowledge of the materials.

would most people agree that this test is more based off test taking skill than content knowledge?? most of the passage-based questions i encountered could be figured out just with the information in the passage.

 

[jazzmetal]

Sometimes yes, sometimes no.
I was expecting to be able to pull a lot of answers from the passages when I took the May 18th MCAT. Unfortunately for me, my C/P section required way more discrete knowledge than reasoning skills, which I was not prepared for.
My advice: consider the section banks key practice material, but don't count on the real test to use those exact skills in that same proportion, and don't limit yourself to the content that they touch on or assume that you'll see the same topic emphasis. Be sure to study from the AAMC's official topic lists for each section - it's all fair game.

 

[pms_testosterone]

Yes.
But sometimes you will get a "passage question" that's really just a simple question based on your prior knowledge, so there's that.

 

[Coltuna]

I would say content review is important to learn the "language of the test." I'll admit I know very little content and as I'm taking my FL's now and reviewing, most of my "why I missed it" explanations are "didn't know what _____ meant"

 

[jazzmetal]

i agree about learning the language of the test, and that many passage-based questions will be aimed at a discrete bit of knowledge. my only caution is that, if you use only the AAMC practice materials and work backwards, you'll be covering only the topics that show up on those particular materials, which can leave gaps and give you a false sense of what is going to show up on the real test. example: i did a really detailed analysis of the B/B Section Bank questions and found that almost 40% of those questions involved knowledge of amino acids. i then spent a ton of time making sure i knew everything about amino acids, at the expense of other topics that showed up little or never in the AAMC materials - but did show up on test day.

i do think reverse engineering from the official practice materials is an effective way to learn, especially for CARS (no other test company gets it quite right). just don't do *only* that. make sure you leave time for straight content review using the official topic list as a guide. and don't assume that come test day, you'll be able to rely heavily on solid reasoning skills to pull answers from the passage. i'm usually pretty good at that and i think it took me a long way on AAMC2, in particular, but it didn't seem to help me out as much as i was hoping on my actual test.

take all of my advice with a grain of salt for now, since i don't have my scores yet.

 

[dpmd]

Assuming you succeed this will not be the last test on the path to becoming a doctor that relies heavily upon test taking skills apart from content knowledge. However, you will find that test taking skills alone won't be enough. The key is to cultivate both.