WHEN TO START STUDYING FOR MCAT

[walrus99]

Hi everyone!

I registered for my MCAT exam on September 19th.
I'll be taking The Princeton Review Ultimate MCAT course M-F, 3 hours each day. from June 25th-August 15th.

All 9 of the PR books have just been delivered to me and I feel antsy to start studying for the MCAT now. The thing is I dont have/no how to come up with a study schedule. Its April 1st and I wanted to study at least 6 hours a week every week until June. Do I just open one of the textbooks and begin studying. Should I wait to start studying for the MCAT until the course starts? Does anyone have a study schedule they made using the 9 PR textbooks. Preferably a 16 week study schedule. All and any advice is appreciated, I feel so overwhelmed/lost!

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[curbsideconsult]

I don't see the point in studying this early if you're paying for an 8 week review course anyway. Also, maybe move your test date closer to the end of the review course? I assume with an 8 week course you'll be doing plenty of practice exams along the way so why not take the exam when everything is fresh?

 

[Vladimir7]

Hey man!

Your situation is interesting because the course will essentially run you through the entire 9 books in 7 weeks (from what i hear), but you definitely do NOT want to give yourself only 7 weeks to study. She took the TPR, did quite well on the test, but was panicking/stressed towards the end. So my advice would be to start early. At least to get familiar with the style of exam, exam content etc..

Also, as poster said above^ you want your test date as close to the end of your studying as possible. If you plan on taking most of your Full Length practice exams and reviewing them during the TPR course then take the test right after the course is over. If, like some, you'd rather do all your content review first, then have several weeks to take all the FLs, then you can give yourself a month for strictly test-taking and reviewing answers.

While I did not take a course, I did use all 9 TPR books. I had to find a home-study schedule that would go through the entire book within 10-12 weeks and the Exam-Krackers 10-week schedule worked wonders. It's easy to find online, just look up exam krackers MCAT home study schedule. Basically, you study for 3 hours each day and do 1 chapter. Since I was using the TPR I just matched the EK chapter/book with the corresponding TPR chapter. Most of the time, 1 EK chapter = 2 TPR Chapters. The EK is very condensed.

Though it was a ten week schedule, I used 12, because I wanted to focus on FL exams at the end. I went from 497 (40th percentile) FL practice score week 1 to 512 (87th percentile) week 11. Thought the TPR was great, and I plan to take the test in a week!

Feel free to pm if you have more TPR/MCAT related questions!