Hi there!
There’s a lot of wisdom in your question and possibly some helpful points to consider, so we’ll break it down…
You are not kidding: “the difficulty in knowing exactly what material the AAMC will test”
So here are some direct quotes from different ID’s on Reddit:
• Holy Enzyme Kinetics.!!!
• barely any physics problems
• Very little physics
• wow, hi physics. :/ I wound up with multiple physics and calculation-heavy problems
• Virtually no chemistry for me
• heavy calculations. Aargh.
• lots and lots of physics for me.
• A LOT of biochemistry
• +++ orgo
• TONS of Orgo.
• Very little orgo
• entire scratch paper page full of calculations
Of course, part perception but part reality: Not everyone will have the same exam experience whether subjectively or objectively assessed. Ironically, that is the nature of a standardized exam with security controls. The consequence is that there is value in experiencing many full-length tests from different, reputable sources (with careful post-test review and very brief note-taking).
“physics topics that make no connection to biologically/physiologically-relevant concepts”
- Your comment about this issue seems to be in line with our perspective: We have no problems resolving forces on a block in our practice exams, but we do have such questions in our chapter review section, as you mentioned, to develop a fundamental understanding. But our exams resolve forces at joints, deal with the electronics of cardiac muscle and defibrillators, radioactivity, refraction/optics and the eye, endoscopy and the critical angle, waves and the ear canal, just to name a few.
But here’s the asterisk! Most students report that during the real exam (and you can see this also in the 2 AAMC FL tests), you can instantly detect a passage with the ‘old’ style (for example, a descriptive non-research based passage about solubility from a General Chemistry perspective with no overt relation to anything biological or biochemical). You will also find some discretes (AAMC practice FLs) that specifically test your knowledge related to atomic structure/quantum numbers (classic ‘old’ MCAT fare).
It is useful to have a peek at Bloom’s taxonomy (
https://tips.uark.edu/wp-content/up...my_pyramid_cake-style-use-with-permission.jpg) and to know that even the ‘old’ MCAT questions tended towards the upper part of the scale (btw, a 2008 study in Science showed that MCAT does this better than many major standardized exams, and certainly, better than undergrad exams; references below), and the new MCAT, as you have alluded to, means reasoning is even more critical.
Without commenting specifically about other companies, just to say that practice tests require balance and should reflect, more or less, the balance that the AAMC’s FLs have, and hopefully over time, you will have covered enough material such that if your exam experience is weighted one way or the other, it’s OK, because the reasoning skills developed over time will be the primary source of correct answers, and then there will be some random knowledge-based questions here or there which won’t likely be the deciding factor in the scaled score you are aiming for (of course I’m presuming you are a pretty good student judging from your question!).
http://www.physics.emory.edu/faculty/weeks//journal/mcatdebunk.pdf
http://science.sciencemag.org/content/319/5862/414
