Which book series offers the hardest practice for bio?

[Medhatter]

After seeing the brutal questions in the Jun 17th MCAT, I'd like to play it safe. Which series has the hardest questions/passages? TPR, TBR, Kaplan or Nova? I've already done EK, but not the 1001 book.

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[snipermonkey]

BR
hands down

 

[BaronVonZ]

I'm in the same boat medhatter. Now can someone tell me what BR stands for?

 

[MightyMoose]

BR = Berkeley Review.


OP, I would just do the 1001 EK questions. They are pretty solid. But MCAT studying is personal preference and $$ preference.

 

[Don Draper]

Hardest? BR.

But I'm not sure if harder = better. Sometimes they are made harder by expecting you to have a bunch of background info, this is "hard" which doesn't help.

If you really wanted to be good at bio, it is thinking in pictures. This is why upper division courses are great for bio. You start to build a great mental library of biological pictures. Great textbooks or videos or whatever can help you here too.

I enjoy BR but sometimes don't. Their bio passages will probably be the best, but don't go in there trying to ace them as some questions may be silly. EK is just going to familiarize you with everything and prime you for reading science stuff/knowing the material.

EK is probably more focused on what you need but less passage based. EK is generally considered easier also.

 

[Rayhaan]

Hardest? BR.

But I'm not sure if harder = better. Sometimes they are made harder by expecting you to have a bunch of background info, this is "hard" which doesn't help.

If you really wanted to be good at bio, it is thinking in pictures. This is why upper division courses are great for bio. You start to build a great mental library of biological pictures. Great textbooks or videos or whatever can help you here too.

I enjoy BR but sometimes don't. Their bio passages will probably be the best, but don't go in there trying to ace them as some questions may be silly. EK is just going to familiarize you with everything and prime you for reading science stuff/knowing the material.

EK is probably more focused on what you need but less passage based. EK is generally considered easier also.

I second this. TBR was great for the tons of passages, but there were ALOT that were just really far out. After doing practice exams and then the real deal (AM June 17th) I found that as Don said, being able to extract information from both diagrams and text quickly is what it is all about. Get familiar with this. Do TBR passages, but also look at diagrams or read journal articles and see if you can extract information. I truly believe the bio section is different from PS in that bio passages are like extremely scientific verbal reasoning passages.

 

[Medhatter]

Questions based on hard passages would be ideal. I will see if I can get my hands on BR.

Is Ek1001 challenging or straightforward?

 

[MightyMoose]

Questions based on hard passages would be ideal. I will see if I can get my hands on BR.

Is Ek1001 challenging or straightforward?

I would say it's Medium. It's not the easiest and it's not the most difficult, but it does pound out the basics. If you go through 1001, you'll have a pretty good sense of most bio topics.