TPR (vs Kaplan, vs TBR) for content review, EK for practice?

[hat]

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I will be taking the MCAT most likely in January 2017 and am working on a study plan. I'm a non-trad student and it has been several years since some of my prereqs (ie over 4 years since Bio 1). For this reason, and because I will have 5-6 months to study, I'd like to spend a couple months on content review and then several months on practice/consolidation.

I've heard consistently good things about Examkrackers and AAMC materials for practice, but opinions seem pretty split on Kaplan, TPR, and TBR for content review. From briefly looking at TPR and Kaplan in a bookstore, I can say I prefer the writing style and formatting of TPR over Kaplan. It seems very readable and I like the diagrams, whereas Kaplan reminds me of some of the worse textbooks I've read, with no personality and with extraneous diagrams and text boxes crammed into every corner. For this reason I'm leaning toward TPR over Kaplan. I'm not leaning toward TBR because of the price, and also because I don't even know where to read a sample, since it's not in stores or on Amazon, but am open to considering it if there is a good reason.

The main reason I'm hesitant about TPR is because reviews suggest it was not really properly updated for the new MCAT, and there are supposedly a lot of errors in sample problems. Can anyone who has used the books clarify just how big of a deal these issues are? In particular as I am using it mainly for content review, I am hoping that these things will not be a problem and I can smooth things out with EK/AAMC practice, and also by supplementing my content review with Khan/other online resources.

I would really appreciate any perspective on this, particularly from people who have used at least one of these books and taken the new MCAT.

Thanks!

 

[swishr]

I used Kaplan. My biggest gaps were in some basic chem/physics/bio that I hadn't reviewed in 3 years so I knew I needed something comprehensive. I found the material to be sometimes more than I needed to know, but the tips, mnemonics and chapter outlines streamlined my studying. On my actual MCAT I found ~10 questions on details that I had viewed as "way more specific than I'll need to know" when I came across them in the chapters so I'm pretty thankful to have at least had that recognition factor. If you have the time to get through most of the Kaplan resources, determine your weaknesses and use other resources (Khan, AAMC, etc ) to supplement...it's worth it. I studied for 4-5 months about 18 hrs a week.

Final verdict on Kaplan: maybe not the most efficient study material but I felt confident that I would at least recognize and recall the most important aspects of MCAT material come test day and that helped me score 520+.

In the last 2 weeks I reviewed EK materials in my weaker subjects - good review and helpful to see the same material worded differently but not enough if you're a few years removed from the material, in my opinion.