I'm currently in the process of reviewing for the MCAT using BR and Examkrackers. I also took a practice AAMC exam, and from what I'm gathering, BR is the hardest test prep materials of them all.
First of all, you do NOT have to know every single content detail that the BR chapters discuss. I think BR makes the passages and questions very difficult in order to thoroughly prepare you for the MCAT, but when is enough enough??? They seem to overburden you rather than adequately prepare you.
In my opinion, Examkrackers is the best test prep materials to use for content review. The only drawback is the lack of passages. The "in-class exams" at the end of each review book are great (and are at just the right level of difficulty), but they're simply not enough. If EK included more passages like BR, then I would say you have the only resource you'll ever need to be well-prepared for the MCAT. So to sum up, you have one resource (BR) that provides you with plenty of practice, yet you're overwhelmed with extraneous content; and then you have another resource (EK) where the content is great, but the practice is lacking. Where's the happy medium?
With the BR series, I would only use it for reading comprehension purposes. Devote a lot of time to the Verbal Reasoning book and try to answer questions from the science books that are only explicitly based on what's in the passage. Quite a few of the stand-alone type questions and strictly content-based questions in BR are more difficult than those encountered in AAMC's practice tests (and perhaps the actual MCAT itself).
I spent $339 on the entire set of BR books, and I feel that I spent way too much on them. The question I have for the BR authors is: Are they just over-preparing you for the MCAT, or are they over-burdening you to the point where (or rather, so that) you start to feel insecure about your decision to apply to medical school???
