timing and test taking strategies

[MedGrl@2022]

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What do you use to manage your time during the MCAT? I have been finding myself running out of time in the physical sciences section. I get caught up in calculations and thinking about problems. What suggestions do you all have for completing the sections on time and successfully?

Thank you for all your help!

Verónica

 

[Captain Sisko]

What do you use to manage your time during the MCAT? I have been finding myself running out of time in the physical sciences section. I get caught up in calculations and thinking about problems. What suggestions do you all have for completing the sections on time and successfully?

Thank you for all your help!

Verónica

just tell yourself to keep moving. if you take more than a minute, mark it, guess and move on. i tried to do this and ended up with plenty of time to go back and check my work. sometimes it takes that second look a few minutes after first seeing something to understand how to approach it. just keep moving.

 

[Leonardo Noto]

What do you use to manage your time during the MCAT? I have been finding myself running out of time in the physical sciences section. I get caught up in calculations and thinking about problems. What suggestions do you all have for completing the sections on time and successfully?

Thank you for all your help!

Verónica

Practice, practice, practice--under timed conditions! Working on your timing is an essential part of test preparation for any standardized test--and you have a lot more really important standardized tests ahead of you once you get into med school, so learn this now. The way you get good at standardized test time management is the same way you get good at anything else, by practicing (lots!) under realistic conditions (time constraints in this case). Back when I took the test (umm, stegosaurus burgers for lunch...) a lot of the physics questions could be more or less answered without precisely doing the math. You could rule out many of the choices that were clearly wrong and then do a quick calculation(s) to confirm you answer. I suspect that this is still true because the MCAT is ultimately a test of critical thinking skills and general scientific knowledge, not a test of whether you'd make a good physicist.

Dr. Leonardo Noto
www.leonardonoto.com

 

[gwjib04]

I get caught up in calculations and thinking about problems.

If I ever find myself doing more than 2 lines of calculations on paper I assume I missed something so I stop right away.

Are you looking at the answers before you start calculations? For a while I would start calculating before I made a guess and that was a waste of time. TBR taught me that you can usually guess the answer intelligently just by looking at the ABCD statements and using PoE.

You've probably read the SDN thread on arithmetic, I found that very helpful. There's some really nice tricks out there for fast estimation, pH calcs, circuits, logs, trig.

 

[dudewheresmymd]

Discretes first as insanely fast as possible followed by 7 mins/passage, skip questions that don't come to you within the first 5-10 seconds at looking at the question and come back...triage passages do easy ones then hard ones last to build confidence (general test taking strategies)

 

[MedGrl@2022]

If I ever find myself doing more than 2 lines of calculations on paper I assume I missed something so I stop right away.

Are you looking at the answers before you start calculations? For a while I would start calculating before I made a guess and that was a waste of time. TBR taught me that you can usually guess the answer intelligently just by looking at the ABCD statements and using PoE.

You've probably read the SDN thread on arithmetic, I found that very helpful. There's some really nice tricks out there for fast estimation, pH calcs, circuits, logs, trig.

Where can I find the SDN thread on arithmetic?

 

[MedGrl@2022]

Discretes first as insanely fast as possible followed by 7 mins/passage, skip questions that don't come to you within the first 5-10 seconds at looking at the question and come back...triage passages do easy ones then hard ones last to build confidence (general test taking strategies)

Is there a way that you could know from the review button which one the discretes are?

 

[gwjib04]

Where can I find the SDN thread on arithmetic?

Watch out for
Vihsadas and BerkReviewTeach posts, they're usually the juiciest

Lots of people memorize the sin and cos as well as decimal equivalents of 1/5, 1/6, 1/7, 1/8, 1/9

Arithmetic1
http://forums.studentdoctor.net/showthread.php?t=528349

Arithmetic2
http://forums.studentdoctor.net/showthread.php?p=7869808

Have you looked at this "sticky"?: http://forums.studentdoctor.net/showthread.php?t=516521

http://www.premed411.com/pdfs/math.pdf

Go to the 9th post of this one and download the .doc file: http://www.***********.com/showthread.php?41-Tips-for-taking-MCAT

Course saver (one word) always comes up as asteriks when I post the above url but that's what's hidden....

This is all stuff that takes time to incorporate into your skill set. The TBR books have tricks I haven't seen on the web.

 

[adrakdavra]

1. Are you Practicing under real timed conditions?
2. Are you doing real AAMC, TPR , TBR, EK , KAP etc ?
3. Is your math sold ?
4. Some people like to skip the hard passages and come back to them later, I like to do them in order and force yourself to guess on the hard question, after all they all worth the same , but if skipping is working for you then go head with it.