can you explain wat your plan is? B/C im in the same boat, i spend too much time reading chapters and reviewing information. (5-6 hours just for ONE CHAPTER.) then im too tired to concentrate on questions/practice passages and i feel like i learned nothing during the day.
Sure, I responded to another user here in a more general advice, but I'll go on more detailed approach here.
My reasoning, based on seeing an user who scored
really well, is that your study plan should reflect not just how much time you have, but how you retain information. For me, reading prep books over and over again will
not teach me biology that I will need. I will end up memorizing details without truly understanding how mechanisms and physiology work, and no prep books really teach you that for
content review. You
need to glance over prep book to get the basic idea and important terminology, but you have to use non-MCAT book (textbook or study guide or your notes, whatever) to get the reasoning skills.
Not everyone, however, is like this. There are people who understand reasoning skills by simply reading the terms. These people are often the same people who worked diligently in their biology courses and may have taken upper level biology (Cell Biology, Molec. Biology, Biochemistry, Physiology, Neuro, etc..). In that case,
do not waste your time with non-MCAT books and stick to SN2ed's plan because you will be doing well on biology as long as 1) you know your organic chemistry, and 2) you already have the reasoning skills.
MCAT is a reasoning skills, not a knowledge test, and my belief is that if you lack a fundamental background, practice passages alone will NOT teach you the reasoning beyond the materials tested in the practice passages.
Let me add to that above statement: I have read about how many people who focused on physiology saw biochemistry/cell/molecular passages in the actual MCAT. And vice versa. This means that if you really had a horrible background in one sub-discipline over another, and that happens to be on the exam, you are screwed because you may not be able to apply anything that is not like your practice MCATs (I have heard many times how some people's real MCATs are NOT what their practices were like...).
I will be timing myself on how much I'll review so that I'll have enough time to do problems (I'll do a realistic amount of problems/passages) and review the problems done. I haven't actually got to how much time one should dedicate to reviewing (SN2ed says 2-3 times more... I think that it depends on the subject). For me, if I get a question wrong in Physics, it usually ends up me smacking the head for not seeing the obvious. On the other hand, something I get wrong in Biology may require me to read on that topic more because a paragraph in BR's explanation will not suffice.
Take one thing as my home message: Do not trust SN2ed's plan as a holy Bible, and he does acknowledge this (he says,
Sadly, there is no guide out there that guarantees 30+.
Many people seem to not read this part). A lot of users (including myself) tend to do that. I'm not saying that SN2ed's schedule is invalid; it is an excellent schedule from someone who knows well about MCAT, but no one knows you better than yourself. Adjust the schedule to see how you would
learn the best. If it's memorizing, memorize. If it's reading, read. If it's doing problems, do lots of problems.
As long as you set up enough time AFTER content reviews to do thorough practices and FLs (you should be doing some while you do content review though), I think you should be golden.
