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The MeVamp Protocol: A Low-Stress Organizational Framework for MCAT Self-Study
How long should I study for the MCAT?
There are way too many variables at play to definitively answer this question. However, 480 hours of sincere effort seems to be the minimum amount of time to consistently bring average students to above-average MCAT scores. This 480-hour minimum can be met in a variety of ways. Here are two very different examples:
(2 hours/day)(5 days/week)(4 weeks/month)(12 months) = 480 hours
(8 hours/day)(6 days/week)(4 weeks/month)(2.5 months) = 480 hours
More concentrated 2-4 month approaches have proven the most effective anecdotally - more applicants use these methods so their results are more visible - but I have worked with multiple 40/520+ scorers who studied for shorter intervals over longer durations. Many don’t have the luxury of a responsibility-free summer vacation, but that doesn’t mean they can’t be just as successful as those who do.
No matter what study duration you’ll use, you must “Know Thyself” in order to reap its benefits. At what hours of the day does your mind work best? How long is your attention span? What nutrition/exercise patterns peak your energy? Do you have a plan to deal with distractions that may come crashing into your study zone?
What MCAT prep materials should I purchase?
These resource rankings are based off personal experience, the experiences of colleagues and clients, and quality ratings I’ve encountered on various pre-medical websites. Whatever your MCAT study budget may be, I recommend you begin purchasing from the top of this list down until you exhaust your budget and/or realize you’ll never have enough time to use any more resources:
#1. “The Official Guide to the MCAT Exam” by The AAMC.
#2. ≥4 Full-Length Practice Exams. Computer-based tests are preferred if that’s how you’ll eventually take the MCAT. Purchase enough for you to take one every two weeks until your exam date. AAMC tests are held in the highest esteem. All other companies have their strengths and weaknesses but, unless a brand’s questions are downright misleading, quantity is king here.
#3. “The ExamKrackers Complete MCAT Home Study Package.”
#4-Cheap. The Complete Set of Princeton Review MCAT Review Books.
#4-Expensive. The Princeton Review “Self-Paced Class Option." This is an expensive resource, but it includes a copy of the AAMC Official Guide, all the Princeton Review Books, 11 Princeton Review Full-Length Practice Exams, and access to their online library of lessons, practice questions, and “amplifire” learning technology. If you’re a self-studier willing to splurge… I’d suggest you do it here.
#5. The AAMC Official MCAT Question Pack Bundle (Online)
#6. The Complete Set of Berkeley Review Home Study Books.
#7. ExamKrackers “1001 Question Book Series”
#8. Kaplan MCAT Complete 7-Book Subject Review
How should I study for the MCAT?
Brace yourself for a long-winded theoretical introduction...
Have you ever heard of Bloom’s Taxonomy? It was revised in a 2001 work entitled “A Taxonomy for Teaching, Learning, and Assessment.” If human cognition were a swimming pool, this revised taxonomy would be the depth markers around its edge. The six “depths of processing” are:
Level 1: Remembering
Level 2: Understanding
Level 3: Applying
Level 4: Analyzing
Level 5: Evaluating
Level 6: Creating
The deeper you can dive with a certain concept, the better you’ll truly understand it. Example: It’s obvious that the first person to synthesize glycine in a lab had a greater depth of insight than the hundred-millionth high schooler to remember the names of the “20 Essential Amino Acids.” Creation is hard. Remembering is easier.
To put it a different way, human intelligence is determined by connections – the strength and density of our neural webs. To learn, we must constantly develop new connections. More connections are better than less. Sensually and emotionally vivid connections are better than dull. Narrative connections are better than acausal. And deep connections are better than superficial. Marvin Minsky had the right idea:
“If you understand something in only one way, then you don’t really understand it at all. The secret of what anything means to us depends on how we’ve connected it to all the other things we know. Well-connected representations let you turn ideas around in your mind, to envision things from many perspectives until you find one that works for you. And that’s what we mean by thinking!” - Marvin Minsky
Although the MCAT appears cognitively difficult, it is restricted by its multiple-choice format. No multiple choice exam is able to test your knowledge any deeper than Level 4: Analyze. Levels 5 and 6 require lengthy original responses and large-scale projects - things too cumbersome for a worldwide standardized test.
Below is the Bloom’s Taxonomy breakdown of the current MCAT. This is the result of my own calculation. Nowhere does the AAMC validate this information, but I’m confident in my results because these near-perfect thirds seem contrived:
Bloom Level ≤2: Remembering/Understanding (78 questions - ⅓ Exam)
Bloom Level 3: Apply (76 questions - ⅓ Exam)
Bloom Level 4: Analyze (76 questions - ⅓ Exam)
This places the Average Bloom Level of the New MCAT at around a 2.8. Although slightly deeper than the old MCAT, which measured at 2.57 in a 2008 article entitled “Application of Bloom’s Taxonomy Debunks the ‘MCAT Myth’," the new exam is still wading in the shallow end of our cognitive pool...
I don’t have time for this… How should I study for the MCAT?!
“Good athletes practice like they’ll play, but great athletes practice harder than they’ll play.”
To crush a multiple choice exam, don’t study solely with multiple choice questions - dive deeper than that! Challenge yourself with open-ended prompts. Here is how I suggest you go about this:
Step 1 - Familiarizing Yourself with the Structure of the MCAT
Read the AAMC Official Guide cover to cover and check out the “2016 MCAT Master Organizer” attached to this post. Not only does it break the MCAT down into its Sections, Foundational Principles, and Content Categories, it gives you the option to insert your own notes and diagrams. Note: I believe you'll need to create a SDN account to download the Organizer. Even if you’d never take notes within it, you can keep it as a handy-dandy one page summary of the exam's structure - it's probably worth three minutes of your time to download.
Step 2 - Defining "TimeBoxes" and Study Locations
Sit down to a weekly calendar and highlight all of the times that you’ll devote to studying. Take the sum of this weekly time (in minutes) and divide it by 14. Is the resulting quotient closest to 30, 60, or 90 minutes? Whatever the answer is for you, section off your highlighted time into “timeboxes” of that length… it’s ok if your time doesn’t divide perfectly into these durations, just lengthen or shorten a few of them until all your study time is packaged up.
This “timeboxing” method - scheduling study units at consistent times every week - has been shown to drastically improve concentration, by making your studies a product of habit rather than a product of willpower. I'll discuss four different types of timeboxes in this program - BUILD, RECALL, TEST, and REVIEW. They are each very important, and you'll learn about their roles soon.
A consistent environment is just as important as a consistent schedule. Find a comfortable location that is free of distraction, and return to it every time you study and only when you study. You must train your brain to associate your study area solely with work. Thus, spaces that serve other life functions such as your bed or living room couch are poor choices.
Use your study area to mimic the environment that you’ll eventually encounter at the MCAT testing center. What clothes will you wear on test day? Are you taking the computerized or paper exam? Will you wear earplugs or the noise-cancelling headphones they provide? Note: I highly recommend using disposable foam earplugs. Nearly every testing center allows you to bring in your own sealed pairs - pairs that you've gotten comfortable with. In my opinion, the best plugs for your buck are the "Moldex 6800 Pura-Fit Soft-Foam Earplugs." They're green and sold in bulk on Amazon.
Step 3 - Getting Specific about Subjects
If you refer to the “Master Organizer” document, you’ll notice a breakdown of the MCAT by academic subject:
23% Critical Analysis and Reasoning
19% Biology
16% Psychology
13% Biochemistry
9% General Chemistry
8% Sociology
7% Physics
5% Organic Chemistry
This breakdown was calculated by information provided from the AAMC. I suggest that you mimic the MCAT’s composition by assigning each subject a certain number of timeboxes per week. For simplicity, I offer a relative relationship below. This “empirical formula” has 14 timeboxes in it. It’s why I asked you to divide your total weekly study time by 14 in the previous step - to make sure you had enough room to study every subject every week.
3x Critical Analysis and Reasoning
3x Biology
2x Psychology
2x Biochemistry
1x General Chemistry
1x Sociology
1x Physics
1x Organic Chemistry
This recipe suggests that, for every one timebox you devote to studying Physics, you should spend approximately three timeboxes on Biology, etc. Please don't drive yourself crazy trying to achieve perfect ratios! These are just general relationships to consider as you set up your own schedule.
Step 4 - BUILD Timeboxes: Constructing Massive Open-Ended Quiz Banks from Your Prep Materials
For the first 20-40% of your study program, all of your timeboxes will be of the BUILD variety. To begin your very first timebox - let’s say it’s Biology themed - turn off your phone, hide it from sight, pop in your earplugs, pull out your ExamKrackers Biology Review Book (or whatever resource you have) and place it on the table next to your laptop or notebook.
Open the review book to the first page and begin reading… but! Don't take notes! Not too many of the traditional kind anyway.
Verbatim notetaking was necessary centuries ago when books were hideously expensive and recordings didn’t exist, but times have changed. You probably own a set of MCAT review books and a laptop with access to thousands of relevant webpages. Their information is meticulously organized, and remains constantly at your fingertips. For this reason, it seems wasteful for you to spend so many of your precious timeboxes scribbling traditional notes - a cognitively shallow task - when you could be building tools to help you dive deep! The tools I’m referring to are “opened-ended quiz banks.”
As you read through your review book, think like a professor. Chew on the material. Think of what questions you’d offer your students to really challenge their understanding of the topic, and write them down. Some prompts could be simple and direct: “Name the 20 Essential Amino Acids.” Some could be more complex: “Describe the process of neurotransmitter release via the neuronal action potential.” What matters most is that you keep thinking, keep identifying interesting connections within the material, and keep crafting questions to address those connections. Note: Because no specific content knowledge is necessary for the CARS section, BUILD timeboxes are not necessary. Apply the TEST and REVIEW timeboxes discussed in Steps 6-7, and analyze articles from highbrow periodicals like The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and The Economist.
Back to quiz banks! How should your organize them?
Old Suggestion: In the past, I've suggested that students organize their questions in accordance with the AAMC's "Foundational Concept & Content Category" framework. That's the way you see topics organized in the AAMC Official Guide. It seemed logical... but... in practice, it wastes too much time to sort all of your questions into these categories. It also takes too much time to refer back to your textbooks when looking for answers to your questions, constantly jumping from book to book, etc. If this method still appeals to you, check out the "Master Organizer" I've attached to this post. It will allow you to sort your quiz questions into separate banks for every AAMC Content Category.
New Suggestion: I've learned from my mistakes. The most time efficient way to create these quiz banks is to build a separate Word document for every textbook you own. You can simply list questions chronologically as you progress through the book. Here's an example below:
THE BERKELEY REVIEW - Biology Part I
Section IV: Reproduction and Development
1. What is GnRH? What gland releases it and for what purpose? (pg.209)
2. Describe and/or diagram the male reproductive anatomy. (pg.220-211)
...continue like this, interspersing very specific questions with broad sweeping ones.
Notice that I appended each question with the page number(s) that contain the answer. You could also substitute a URL or other notation if you were collecting your information from a nonliterary source. Do you see how these quiz banks and your prep materials are going to work together!? When you're actually taking these quizzes in the next step of our plan, your prep textbooks will serve as your answer key! It's a beautiful thing.
Pack your weeks full of BUILD timeboxes until you have finished one set of prep materials. After you've done this, begin substituting some of your BUILDs for the varieties discussed in Steps 5-7. Here's an example:
An extremely diligent pre-med purchased materials from EK, TBR, and TPR. She planned on studying ExamKrackers for the first month, Berkeley for the second, and Princeton for a third and final month...
After her first month of studying with 16 BUILD timeboxes per week, she has finished her EK books and developed her quiz banks. During the second month, she will devote 8 timeboxes to BUILDing TBR, while the other 8 will be used to RECALL ExamKrackers and TEST/REVIEW (see Steps 5-7). In the final month, only 4 timeboxes will be used to BUILD Princeton, while the rest will be devoted to the other - more cognitively demanding - timebox types.
***Alternatively, you could just build RECALL time into the back end of each of your BUILD timeboxes. It is not necessary to separate these two processes if you don't want to.
Step 5 - RECALL Timeboxes: Quizzing Yourself with Open-Ended Questions
Congratulations on finishing your BUILD stage! ...time to get serious. Lock yourself deep within your study dungeon and begin quizzing using the banks you've created. It’s very important to give yourself zero assistance when trying to answer these questions. Rack your brain, grinding out as detailed and complete an answer as you can. Only when you’ve given a question your all may you refer back to the “answer key.”
If you correctly answer a prompt, indicate so with a green dot (or a computerized equivalent). If you answered a question incorrectly or incompletely, indicate so with a red dot. As you work through your quiz banks multiple times, some questions will have no red dots next to them while others will look like they’ve been infected with chicken pox. Continue to focus your attention on the "infected" questions until you blanket them with fresh green foliage.
Academics refer to this method of self-quizzing as “Active Recall,” and they offer the following tips to take its effectiveness to the next level: Engage as many of your senses as possible when answering these questions. More sensual/emotional stimulus = more memory retention. Stand up and pace around the room while giving your answers, draw diagrams on a whiteboard, even sing! If you have a very intelligent friend or someone you’d be embarrassed to disappoint, give them your quiz bank and have him/her drill you into submission; the more uncomfortable you make yourself now, the easier a multiple choice exam will feel.
Step 6 - TEST Timeboxes: Simulating the MCAT
In addition to RECALL, this is also a perfect time to introduce full-length practice tests and other multiple-choice question sets into your study schedule (these are called TEST timeboxes). A weekly full-length practice exam is ideal, but if you don’t have enough practice exams to last until your official MCAT date, just substitute with boatloads of individual MCAT-like multiple choice questions.
If you’re going to wear earplugs during the actual exam, do the same in practice. If you have a desktop computer with separate keyboard and mouse sitting in a room that perfectly resembles a Prometric Testing Center, lucky you! Use it. You could even go so far as to always take these practice exams at the same time of day as your actual testing appointment, after eating the same meals! The better you can simulate the testing environment, the more accurately you can gauge your preparedness.
Step 7 - REVIEW Timeboxes: Checking Your Answers & Amplifying Your Learning
It is critically important that you set aside some timeboxes in the days following each practice exam to review its questions fully - regardless of whether you answered them correctly or incorrectly. The multiple choice questions themselves might not always be cognitively taxing, but the review process can be transformed into a beautifully demanding exercise. Analyze each answer choice:
If this statement is true, why must it be true? How do you know?
If this statement is false, in what way is it false? If this false statement were true, what implications would it have for other elements of the system? Could you alter the wording of this false statement to make it true?
Step 8 - Bringing it All Together!
At some point, you will finish working through all of your prep materials and officially complete the BUILD stage. Keep your weekly schedule stocked full of RECALL, TEST, and REVIEW timeboxes until 1-3 days before your exam date. At that point, taper down for some strategic recovery time.
All the methods mentioned above will go a long way to developing you into a world-class cognitive athlete but... as cheesy as it sounds... none of this stuff will work if you don’t believe in yourself. You truly can do this. You can earn, not just an acceptable score, but a powerful score. And you’ll probably have more fun than you think along the way. I wish you all the best, and I leave you with my all-time favorite poem about attitude:
“It Couldn’t Be Done” by Edgar Albert Guest
Somebody said that it couldn’t be done
But he with a chuckle replied
That “maybe it couldn’t,” but he would be one
Who wouldn’t say so till he’d tried.
So he buckled right in with the trace of a grin
On his face. If he worried he hid it.
He started to sing as he tackled the thing
That couldn’t be done, and he did it!
Somebody scoffed: “Oh, you’ll never do that;
At least no one ever has done it;”
But he took off his coat and he took off his hat
And the first thing we knew he’d begun it.
With a lift of his chin and a bit of a grin,
Without any doubting or quiddit,
He started to sing as he tackled the thing
That couldn’t be done, and he did it.
There are thousands to tell you it cannot be done,
There are thousands to prophesy failure,
There are thousands to point out to you one by one,
The dangers that wait to assail you.
But just buckle in with a bit of a grin,
Just take off your coat and go to it;
Just start in to sing as you tackle the thing
That “cannot be done,” and you’ll do it.
How long should I study for the MCAT?
There are way too many variables at play to definitively answer this question. However, 480 hours of sincere effort seems to be the minimum amount of time to consistently bring average students to above-average MCAT scores. This 480-hour minimum can be met in a variety of ways. Here are two very different examples:
(2 hours/day)(5 days/week)(4 weeks/month)(12 months) = 480 hours
(8 hours/day)(6 days/week)(4 weeks/month)(2.5 months) = 480 hours
More concentrated 2-4 month approaches have proven the most effective anecdotally - more applicants use these methods so their results are more visible - but I have worked with multiple 40/520+ scorers who studied for shorter intervals over longer durations. Many don’t have the luxury of a responsibility-free summer vacation, but that doesn’t mean they can’t be just as successful as those who do.
No matter what study duration you’ll use, you must “Know Thyself” in order to reap its benefits. At what hours of the day does your mind work best? How long is your attention span? What nutrition/exercise patterns peak your energy? Do you have a plan to deal with distractions that may come crashing into your study zone?
What MCAT prep materials should I purchase?
These resource rankings are based off personal experience, the experiences of colleagues and clients, and quality ratings I’ve encountered on various pre-medical websites. Whatever your MCAT study budget may be, I recommend you begin purchasing from the top of this list down until you exhaust your budget and/or realize you’ll never have enough time to use any more resources:
#1. “The Official Guide to the MCAT Exam” by The AAMC.
#2. ≥4 Full-Length Practice Exams. Computer-based tests are preferred if that’s how you’ll eventually take the MCAT. Purchase enough for you to take one every two weeks until your exam date. AAMC tests are held in the highest esteem. All other companies have their strengths and weaknesses but, unless a brand’s questions are downright misleading, quantity is king here.
#3. “The ExamKrackers Complete MCAT Home Study Package.”
#4-Cheap. The Complete Set of Princeton Review MCAT Review Books.
#4-Expensive. The Princeton Review “Self-Paced Class Option." This is an expensive resource, but it includes a copy of the AAMC Official Guide, all the Princeton Review Books, 11 Princeton Review Full-Length Practice Exams, and access to their online library of lessons, practice questions, and “amplifire” learning technology. If you’re a self-studier willing to splurge… I’d suggest you do it here.
#5. The AAMC Official MCAT Question Pack Bundle (Online)
#6. The Complete Set of Berkeley Review Home Study Books.
#7. ExamKrackers “1001 Question Book Series”
#8. Kaplan MCAT Complete 7-Book Subject Review
How should I study for the MCAT?
Brace yourself for a long-winded theoretical introduction...
Have you ever heard of Bloom’s Taxonomy? It was revised in a 2001 work entitled “A Taxonomy for Teaching, Learning, and Assessment.” If human cognition were a swimming pool, this revised taxonomy would be the depth markers around its edge. The six “depths of processing” are:
Level 1: Remembering
Level 2: Understanding
Level 3: Applying
Level 4: Analyzing
Level 5: Evaluating
Level 6: Creating
The deeper you can dive with a certain concept, the better you’ll truly understand it. Example: It’s obvious that the first person to synthesize glycine in a lab had a greater depth of insight than the hundred-millionth high schooler to remember the names of the “20 Essential Amino Acids.” Creation is hard. Remembering is easier.
To put it a different way, human intelligence is determined by connections – the strength and density of our neural webs. To learn, we must constantly develop new connections. More connections are better than less. Sensually and emotionally vivid connections are better than dull. Narrative connections are better than acausal. And deep connections are better than superficial. Marvin Minsky had the right idea:
“If you understand something in only one way, then you don’t really understand it at all. The secret of what anything means to us depends on how we’ve connected it to all the other things we know. Well-connected representations let you turn ideas around in your mind, to envision things from many perspectives until you find one that works for you. And that’s what we mean by thinking!” - Marvin Minsky
Although the MCAT appears cognitively difficult, it is restricted by its multiple-choice format. No multiple choice exam is able to test your knowledge any deeper than Level 4: Analyze. Levels 5 and 6 require lengthy original responses and large-scale projects - things too cumbersome for a worldwide standardized test.
Below is the Bloom’s Taxonomy breakdown of the current MCAT. This is the result of my own calculation. Nowhere does the AAMC validate this information, but I’m confident in my results because these near-perfect thirds seem contrived:
Bloom Level ≤2: Remembering/Understanding (78 questions - ⅓ Exam)
Bloom Level 3: Apply (76 questions - ⅓ Exam)
Bloom Level 4: Analyze (76 questions - ⅓ Exam)
This places the Average Bloom Level of the New MCAT at around a 2.8. Although slightly deeper than the old MCAT, which measured at 2.57 in a 2008 article entitled “Application of Bloom’s Taxonomy Debunks the ‘MCAT Myth’," the new exam is still wading in the shallow end of our cognitive pool...
I don’t have time for this… How should I study for the MCAT?!
“Good athletes practice like they’ll play, but great athletes practice harder than they’ll play.”
To crush a multiple choice exam, don’t study solely with multiple choice questions - dive deeper than that! Challenge yourself with open-ended prompts. Here is how I suggest you go about this:
Step 1 - Familiarizing Yourself with the Structure of the MCAT
Read the AAMC Official Guide cover to cover and check out the “2016 MCAT Master Organizer” attached to this post. Not only does it break the MCAT down into its Sections, Foundational Principles, and Content Categories, it gives you the option to insert your own notes and diagrams. Note: I believe you'll need to create a SDN account to download the Organizer. Even if you’d never take notes within it, you can keep it as a handy-dandy one page summary of the exam's structure - it's probably worth three minutes of your time to download.
Step 2 - Defining "TimeBoxes" and Study Locations
Sit down to a weekly calendar and highlight all of the times that you’ll devote to studying. Take the sum of this weekly time (in minutes) and divide it by 14. Is the resulting quotient closest to 30, 60, or 90 minutes? Whatever the answer is for you, section off your highlighted time into “timeboxes” of that length… it’s ok if your time doesn’t divide perfectly into these durations, just lengthen or shorten a few of them until all your study time is packaged up.
This “timeboxing” method - scheduling study units at consistent times every week - has been shown to drastically improve concentration, by making your studies a product of habit rather than a product of willpower. I'll discuss four different types of timeboxes in this program - BUILD, RECALL, TEST, and REVIEW. They are each very important, and you'll learn about their roles soon.
A consistent environment is just as important as a consistent schedule. Find a comfortable location that is free of distraction, and return to it every time you study and only when you study. You must train your brain to associate your study area solely with work. Thus, spaces that serve other life functions such as your bed or living room couch are poor choices.
Use your study area to mimic the environment that you’ll eventually encounter at the MCAT testing center. What clothes will you wear on test day? Are you taking the computerized or paper exam? Will you wear earplugs or the noise-cancelling headphones they provide? Note: I highly recommend using disposable foam earplugs. Nearly every testing center allows you to bring in your own sealed pairs - pairs that you've gotten comfortable with. In my opinion, the best plugs for your buck are the "Moldex 6800 Pura-Fit Soft-Foam Earplugs." They're green and sold in bulk on Amazon.
Step 3 - Getting Specific about Subjects
If you refer to the “Master Organizer” document, you’ll notice a breakdown of the MCAT by academic subject:
23% Critical Analysis and Reasoning
19% Biology
16% Psychology
13% Biochemistry
9% General Chemistry
8% Sociology
7% Physics
5% Organic Chemistry
This breakdown was calculated by information provided from the AAMC. I suggest that you mimic the MCAT’s composition by assigning each subject a certain number of timeboxes per week. For simplicity, I offer a relative relationship below. This “empirical formula” has 14 timeboxes in it. It’s why I asked you to divide your total weekly study time by 14 in the previous step - to make sure you had enough room to study every subject every week.
3x Critical Analysis and Reasoning
3x Biology
2x Psychology
2x Biochemistry
1x General Chemistry
1x Sociology
1x Physics
1x Organic Chemistry
This recipe suggests that, for every one timebox you devote to studying Physics, you should spend approximately three timeboxes on Biology, etc. Please don't drive yourself crazy trying to achieve perfect ratios! These are just general relationships to consider as you set up your own schedule.
Step 4 - BUILD Timeboxes: Constructing Massive Open-Ended Quiz Banks from Your Prep Materials
For the first 20-40% of your study program, all of your timeboxes will be of the BUILD variety. To begin your very first timebox - let’s say it’s Biology themed - turn off your phone, hide it from sight, pop in your earplugs, pull out your ExamKrackers Biology Review Book (or whatever resource you have) and place it on the table next to your laptop or notebook.
Open the review book to the first page and begin reading… but! Don't take notes! Not too many of the traditional kind anyway.
Verbatim notetaking was necessary centuries ago when books were hideously expensive and recordings didn’t exist, but times have changed. You probably own a set of MCAT review books and a laptop with access to thousands of relevant webpages. Their information is meticulously organized, and remains constantly at your fingertips. For this reason, it seems wasteful for you to spend so many of your precious timeboxes scribbling traditional notes - a cognitively shallow task - when you could be building tools to help you dive deep! The tools I’m referring to are “opened-ended quiz banks.”
As you read through your review book, think like a professor. Chew on the material. Think of what questions you’d offer your students to really challenge their understanding of the topic, and write them down. Some prompts could be simple and direct: “Name the 20 Essential Amino Acids.” Some could be more complex: “Describe the process of neurotransmitter release via the neuronal action potential.” What matters most is that you keep thinking, keep identifying interesting connections within the material, and keep crafting questions to address those connections. Note: Because no specific content knowledge is necessary for the CARS section, BUILD timeboxes are not necessary. Apply the TEST and REVIEW timeboxes discussed in Steps 6-7, and analyze articles from highbrow periodicals like The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and The Economist.
Back to quiz banks! How should your organize them?
Old Suggestion: In the past, I've suggested that students organize their questions in accordance with the AAMC's "Foundational Concept & Content Category" framework. That's the way you see topics organized in the AAMC Official Guide. It seemed logical... but... in practice, it wastes too much time to sort all of your questions into these categories. It also takes too much time to refer back to your textbooks when looking for answers to your questions, constantly jumping from book to book, etc. If this method still appeals to you, check out the "Master Organizer" I've attached to this post. It will allow you to sort your quiz questions into separate banks for every AAMC Content Category.
New Suggestion: I've learned from my mistakes. The most time efficient way to create these quiz banks is to build a separate Word document for every textbook you own. You can simply list questions chronologically as you progress through the book. Here's an example below:
THE BERKELEY REVIEW - Biology Part I
Section IV: Reproduction and Development
1. What is GnRH? What gland releases it and for what purpose? (pg.209)
2. Describe and/or diagram the male reproductive anatomy. (pg.220-211)
...continue like this, interspersing very specific questions with broad sweeping ones.
Notice that I appended each question with the page number(s) that contain the answer. You could also substitute a URL or other notation if you were collecting your information from a nonliterary source. Do you see how these quiz banks and your prep materials are going to work together!? When you're actually taking these quizzes in the next step of our plan, your prep textbooks will serve as your answer key! It's a beautiful thing.
Pack your weeks full of BUILD timeboxes until you have finished one set of prep materials. After you've done this, begin substituting some of your BUILDs for the varieties discussed in Steps 5-7. Here's an example:
An extremely diligent pre-med purchased materials from EK, TBR, and TPR. She planned on studying ExamKrackers for the first month, Berkeley for the second, and Princeton for a third and final month...
After her first month of studying with 16 BUILD timeboxes per week, she has finished her EK books and developed her quiz banks. During the second month, she will devote 8 timeboxes to BUILDing TBR, while the other 8 will be used to RECALL ExamKrackers and TEST/REVIEW (see Steps 5-7). In the final month, only 4 timeboxes will be used to BUILD Princeton, while the rest will be devoted to the other - more cognitively demanding - timebox types.
***Alternatively, you could just build RECALL time into the back end of each of your BUILD timeboxes. It is not necessary to separate these two processes if you don't want to.
Step 5 - RECALL Timeboxes: Quizzing Yourself with Open-Ended Questions
Congratulations on finishing your BUILD stage! ...time to get serious. Lock yourself deep within your study dungeon and begin quizzing using the banks you've created. It’s very important to give yourself zero assistance when trying to answer these questions. Rack your brain, grinding out as detailed and complete an answer as you can. Only when you’ve given a question your all may you refer back to the “answer key.”
If you correctly answer a prompt, indicate so with a green dot (or a computerized equivalent). If you answered a question incorrectly or incompletely, indicate so with a red dot. As you work through your quiz banks multiple times, some questions will have no red dots next to them while others will look like they’ve been infected with chicken pox. Continue to focus your attention on the "infected" questions until you blanket them with fresh green foliage.
Academics refer to this method of self-quizzing as “Active Recall,” and they offer the following tips to take its effectiveness to the next level: Engage as many of your senses as possible when answering these questions. More sensual/emotional stimulus = more memory retention. Stand up and pace around the room while giving your answers, draw diagrams on a whiteboard, even sing! If you have a very intelligent friend or someone you’d be embarrassed to disappoint, give them your quiz bank and have him/her drill you into submission; the more uncomfortable you make yourself now, the easier a multiple choice exam will feel.
Step 6 - TEST Timeboxes: Simulating the MCAT
In addition to RECALL, this is also a perfect time to introduce full-length practice tests and other multiple-choice question sets into your study schedule (these are called TEST timeboxes). A weekly full-length practice exam is ideal, but if you don’t have enough practice exams to last until your official MCAT date, just substitute with boatloads of individual MCAT-like multiple choice questions.
If you’re going to wear earplugs during the actual exam, do the same in practice. If you have a desktop computer with separate keyboard and mouse sitting in a room that perfectly resembles a Prometric Testing Center, lucky you! Use it. You could even go so far as to always take these practice exams at the same time of day as your actual testing appointment, after eating the same meals! The better you can simulate the testing environment, the more accurately you can gauge your preparedness.
Step 7 - REVIEW Timeboxes: Checking Your Answers & Amplifying Your Learning
It is critically important that you set aside some timeboxes in the days following each practice exam to review its questions fully - regardless of whether you answered them correctly or incorrectly. The multiple choice questions themselves might not always be cognitively taxing, but the review process can be transformed into a beautifully demanding exercise. Analyze each answer choice:
If this statement is true, why must it be true? How do you know?
If this statement is false, in what way is it false? If this false statement were true, what implications would it have for other elements of the system? Could you alter the wording of this false statement to make it true?
Step 8 - Bringing it All Together!
At some point, you will finish working through all of your prep materials and officially complete the BUILD stage. Keep your weekly schedule stocked full of RECALL, TEST, and REVIEW timeboxes until 1-3 days before your exam date. At that point, taper down for some strategic recovery time.
All the methods mentioned above will go a long way to developing you into a world-class cognitive athlete but... as cheesy as it sounds... none of this stuff will work if you don’t believe in yourself. You truly can do this. You can earn, not just an acceptable score, but a powerful score. And you’ll probably have more fun than you think along the way. I wish you all the best, and I leave you with my all-time favorite poem about attitude:
“It Couldn’t Be Done” by Edgar Albert Guest
Somebody said that it couldn’t be done
But he with a chuckle replied
That “maybe it couldn’t,” but he would be one
Who wouldn’t say so till he’d tried.
So he buckled right in with the trace of a grin
On his face. If he worried he hid it.
He started to sing as he tackled the thing
That couldn’t be done, and he did it!
Somebody scoffed: “Oh, you’ll never do that;
At least no one ever has done it;”
But he took off his coat and he took off his hat
And the first thing we knew he’d begun it.
With a lift of his chin and a bit of a grin,
Without any doubting or quiddit,
He started to sing as he tackled the thing
That couldn’t be done, and he did it.
There are thousands to tell you it cannot be done,
There are thousands to prophesy failure,
There are thousands to point out to you one by one,
The dangers that wait to assail you.
But just buckle in with a bit of a grin,
Just take off your coat and go to it;
Just start in to sing as you tackle the thing
That “cannot be done,” and you’ll do it.
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