Acing the MCAT: How to Crush the Chem/Phys and CARS Sections of the test

webinar today we're going to be talking about how to crush the MCAT cards and kit section of the MCAT the reason why we're talking about these sections is because these are the two sections of the exam that students struggle the most with so we'll be focusing on them today in subsequent webinars we'll also talk about the other sections the biob CM section as well as the pyos section so let me go ahead and get our presentation set up here all right so first of all let's just start by introducing everyone so of course my name is Ken I am the mcap program director for the med school coach I run everything mcap related for the company and I'm very excited to be here and help answer the questions that uh all of you attendees are going to have today and also provide some effective strategies and techniques for these two sections Rashad and Caston if you want to go ahead and introduce yourself and Rashad we can have you go first sure hi guys I'm RAV uh I went to Duke University in graduated in 2016 with a degree in biology uh since graduating college I've been working as a teacher through teacher America I teach high school chemistry and and physics in a rural county in North Carolina and I'll be starting med school this upcoming uh fall awesome and my name is Katherine and I attended the University of Miami and graduated in 2018 I studied biochemistry and Neuroscience there and now I'm actually in my Gap year and I'm applyed in this cycle to medical school so I'm excited about that all right great and as I'm sure all of you can see on this slide rashab and Katherine both did really fantastic on MCAT they got some of the highest scores on the exam in the entire nation so they're really going to be able to provide some excellent tips and strategies for the canas and car sections today so uh just to lay out the plan for the webinar today we're going to start off by having a discussion on why the chemis and why the car section are so challenging for students and from there we're going to start first we're going to take a look at the kis section all of you are going to have an opportunity to cackle a few questions yourself see what the CEST section is like uh then we'll discuss some strategies and from there we'll repeat do the same thing for cars chat about why the car section is so difficult we'll provide tips and strategies we'll then discuss very briefly about how med school coach can help you with your mcap preparation and then we'll spend the rest of the webinar answering questions that you have so I highly encourage you all of you throughout this webinar to use the Q&A feature just at any point if you have a question that comes up from our presentation just type it in the Q&A and we'll make sure to cover it at the end of this presentation okay so first of all on this slide we do have an overview of the MCAT exam so you should be familiar with the fact that there are four sections the kempis the cars the biob cam and the pyos section each section has a much longer name which I'll let you read on the slide and the MCAT is scored at between 472 to 528 500 is an average score and of course the higher the score you can get the better your chances of getting into medical school and down here on the bottom just some small details worth noting the K has both passage based and free stating questions every question is worth the same amount of points and there is no guessing penalty on the exam all right so now let's chout about the kempis section what makes the chemical and physical foundations of biological systems so difficult for many students and the first thing I want to talk about is that this section integrates a broad range of subjects if you look at all the sections of the exam the kempis C test and most subjects and you can see right here it's got 30% General chemistry 25% biochemistry 25% physics 15% organic chemistry and 5% biology that's a lot of subjects that students aren't used to seeing all at the same time and it's not like you're going to see 30% of the passages are going to be on General chemistry topics and 25% is going to be on physics you're going to see passages that's going to have questions on multiple topics so you can have one passage with maybe two general chemistry questions two biochemistry and one organic chemistry so the way the mcap formats this section really require students to be able to think about how these topics are related together so how can you apply concepts of General chemistry in Biochemistry for instance thinking about the acid based properties of amino acids and not just for those two subjects but all the subjects so as another example how is General chemistry related to physics well you can think about in physics you have waves sound and light and light is very much important in general chemistry thinking about atomic structure excitation and emission of photons with electrons a second reason why the kempis section is so difficult is that there's a bit of luck factor involved now this I don't I don't mean this by luck as it it's not like you take your MK and you like you flip a coin you either do well or not that's that's not what I mean by luck but here when you're looking at all of these different subjects tested on exam it it actually makes it look not so bad but you really have to keep in mind that each of these subjects covers many many topics and for some like physics it's not just one semester of physics you have two semesters of physics and the first semester is using newtonium mechanics and the second semester is electricity and magnetism and when you're looking at the science section of the MCAT you have 59 questions in physics that's going to be about 25% of them so you're going to have about 14 to 15 physics questions in total that's not a lot of questions 14 to 15 and when you think about the number of topics tested on the kempis section for physics there's a lot more than 14 to 15 topics so what that means is on one exam it might be very heavy on a few like what waves and fluids and on another MCAT Administration it might have a bunch of questions on geometric optics and work and energy so that's why there's bit of a luck factor with a k f section that you know sometimes students they're just really hoping that they don't see some of those topics that they're really weak on and that's just what makes the Kemp disc section difficult to prepare with or difficult to prepare for that you really have to have a strong content foundation and a really broad rate of topics number three the chemp SE requires a complex set of reasoning skills so this is not an exam where you just memorize a bunch of content and you're good to go the MCAT has four types of questions for the kit section and they test the skills that we have written right here on the bottom right knowledge of scientific Concepts and principles scientific reasoning and problem solving reasoning about the design and execution of research and databased and statistical reasoning these are not skills that you can develop from Simply reading books learning content these are skills that you have to learn through practice so you have to do practice questions and really learn about uh how the MCAT is going to require you to apply your knowledge of chemistry and physics to answering M questions and finally another reason and this is big for a lot of students is the math right so for a lot of students the math is a bit of a drag that they just hate doing calculation questions and on the MCAT there's no calculator so you are expected to be able to do some simple math calculations and yes it takes time which is why for the kis section there is a bit of a time pressure when you look at most students studing for the MCAT and you ask them which section of the exam that they struggle with for pacing the kempis section is almost always one of those sections and often it's because the calculations take so long uh and also along with math the Kus section is really the only section exam where you have equations and constants you have to have memorized and sometimes the MCAT is nice and they're going to provide you with some of the equations and constants but it won't be provided for all of the questions so there is some memorization you have to do here okay so with that what I want us to do is actually to take a look at a sample K this section so what I'm going to do is I'm going to go ahead and set up a poll here so that all of you can go ahead and give this a try and let me make sure I have this set you the right hole and we're going to give all of you uh some time to look over this question and once you think you figured it out go ahead and put in what you think the answer is and we'll go ahead and go over it together afterwards e e e all right so let's look at what we have here we have a number of you have participated and it looks like a number of you did quite well so here the correct answer was C so great job the majority of you did get this question right 63% that's fantastic so now let's chat a little bit about uh for the rest of us how to approach this type of MCAT question okay so first of all this is fairly standard as an MCAT question and of course you'll probably recognize this is for organic chemistry so the question is asking in the reaction shown below which of the carbons in carbon one corresponds to the carbon marked with an asterisk shown in compound two now there's a couple ways that you can approach this so the first way is basically using a Brute Force approach saying you know this is chemistry I'm going to use my knowledge of science to approach this question so if you want to use that approach then you would say all right if I look at this molecule I can see it's some kind of organic molecule and if I look at my reaction conditions I'm running it under basic conditions because I've got a strong base and if I have a strong base bases remove protons so if I'm going to remove a proton that means I'm going to remove a proton from an acidic hydrogen on this molecule then when you're thinking about acidic hydrogens in organic chemistry it's either going to be a carboxylic acid a phenol an alcohol or an alpha hydrogen in this case the only acidic hydrogen in this molecule are going to be from alpha hydrogens so if you're looking at Alpha hydrogens well you have some here some here some here and some here but in this case you have to think about which of these Alpha hydrogen if you remove it's going to form a compound that's going to result in the desired product compound to and for the sake of this presentation I'm not going to run through all the different possible combinations but it turns out it's going to be this hydrogen on this carbon you're going to remove if you remove a hydrogen from this carbon then you're going to form an enolate with a negative charge on this carbon which is going to make a nucleophilic attack at the electrophilic carbonal carbon and then when you form that product you can go through the whole Arrow pushing mechanism and you can see oh well if I follow the mechanism then my answer has to be carbon number three and that works completely fine but you know that can be a bit rough for students so there is another way you can approach this which is looking at strategy right and this is a very legitimate strategy on the MCAT looking for patterns and Trends so if I look at my compound one and I compare this with compound two I'm trying to look for similarities between these two molecules and one thing you might have taken note is that there are methyl groups right so here's a methyl group here's a methyl group here's another methyl group and when you're looking at compound two there are also methyl groups and in particular you're looking for a region where you have two methyl groups that are adjacent to each other and if you're looking at your reactant molecule you do have two methyl groups so you can essentially recognize that you know these two methyl groups must be these two methyl groups and then if you're looking for this carbon in the asterisk then you're just looking for an atom that's two carbons away and if you go two carbons away that will give you carbon three so that's certainly a different way you can approach this question so something you want to keep in mind for the k f section that it's not always Brute Force chemistry but strategy can be helpful as well okay so let's go ahead and try one more so I'm going to go ahead and set up another poll here and all of you again can take a few moments think about this question and enter in what you think the correct answer is e e all right let's see what we have here so this one is arguably a little more difficult than the last one so in this case it's not the majority unfortunately it's actually the the the smallest group here so the answer for this question is D so three of you of all of you that are present here chose D so really fantastic job to the three of you who chose D let's now chat a little bit about this question so this question is a biochemistry question and biochemistry is a really high deal topic for the MCAT among the Natural Sciences biochemistry is the second most tested subject after biology so you know looking at diagrams like this with a lineweaver birth plot you know very high yield topics that you definitely want to make sure you review and know very well for the exam so now how do we approach this well uh for those of you who are familiar with line Weaver birth plots you know that uh you have these axes the xaxis is one over substrate concentration the y- AIS is one over reaction velocity and when you're looking at the graphs you should take note of a few things that first of all your x intercept this is1 over km your Y intercept this is one over the Vmax so when you're looking at this graph you have one condition where you have just the enzyme chloride dismutase and you have another graph where you are adding in chloride seeing how it affects the enzyme activity and since there is a change in enzyme activity and looking at M choices you know it has to be some kind of inhibition so the next part then is figuring out well uh what which one is it and as you know if your intercepts are related km as well as Vmax that can allow you to eliminate some answer choices easily first of all you can note that the x intercept changes right the x intercept with or without the chloride is not the same that means km has to change and if km changes well in this case it actually doesn't end up being super helpful in eliminating an because you knowm changes in all of these but the next thing you can think about is how does the km change in this case your x intercept shifts to the left that means it becomes a larger value in order for it to become a larger value that means that your km must have decreased and if your km has to decrease that allows you to eliminate one an Choice which is C because in competitive inhibition km increases it doesn't decrease you're still stuck between these three so then you can go for the Vmax which is the Y intercept again you can see that the Y intercept changes since the Y intercept changes you know that the Vmax has to change so if the Vmax has to change well again that might not be super helpful because the only thing you can really recognize from this graph is that you know competitive inhibition is wrong because that's the only one where Vmax doesn't change so again you can look at how Vmax changes and you can see that your Y intercept moved up which means again your Vmax decreased and if your meax decreases whoops sorry H whoops if your Vmax decreases then that does allow you to H look at your remaining answer choices and for these different answer choices uh again doesn't help too much because there's not much change going on all right and sorry I actually made a small mistake here because the km changes that also allows you to get rid of non-competitive inhibition because in non-competitive inhibition you don't have any change in the cam so if you're then between B and D it is a little tricky you know that both the km has decreased and the Vmax has decreased and that does match both uncompetitive inhibition and mixed inhibition but the difference you have to note here is that the slope with the chloride is not maintained so in uncompetitive inhibition the km and the Vmax change by the same amount so if they change by the same amount you should end up with parallel lines in this case since you don't have parallel lines that means that b is incorrect so the answer here has to be D and sort of just to summarize the point I was trying to make here so when you're looking at non-competitive inhibition km does not change Vmax decreases and uncompetitive inhibition km decreases Vmax decreases but they decrease by the same amount and finally in competitive in addition the km increases the Vmax stays the same so that's why in this case our answer here is going to be D okay so now that all of you have had a little bit of a taste of some ch's questions let's now talk more about strategies and at this point I'm G to go ahead and hand it off to Rashad who's G to talk about some helpful strategies for the CIS section thanks Ken hi guys so here are some of my tips for uh doing really well in the kis section and so I think this one is kind of obvious but my first tip is that you have to practice practice practice unlike some of the other subjects on the MCAT not only is it important to know like the vocab words and the concepts related to chemistry and physics uh but it's really you should really be spending most of your time in kempis uh working on practice so the majority of your study time should be dedicated towards practice problems not just learning content uh and when you're doing that practice I'd really recommend that you simulate conditions that you'd encounter on the MCAT so by that I mean that you should do problems maybe 59 at a time that's the the length the chis section on the MCAT uh you should time yourself and give yourself 95 minutes for those 59 questions you should work without a calculator because you don't get a calculator on the kempis section on the MCAT the problems that you do should be multiple choice problems they should be passage based problems so simulating the way that that that questions work on the MCAT should help you develop the skills that you need uh to do well in this section uh and so I mentioned earlier that you don't get a calculator anything can mention that as well and sometimes that tends to be one of the scariest for students that they have to do math without a calculator like 1950 or something uh and so something that uh you should realize is that you don't need to be too intimidated by the math that the math that you should encounter on the MCAT will not be anywhere near as difficult as the math that you encountered on a in a college physics class or in a college Calculus class that really the math skills that you need or math skills that you probably have already you should be really good at algebra uh you should be good at trigonometry you should know how to do exponents uh you might need to know how to do dimensional analysis but the MCAT tends to make math pretty easy and oftentimes in fact on the MCAT the math works out so that the number that you get at the end is is a round number is one that's easy to calculate and so don't be intimidated when you see math that more than likely the math is they kind of help you out in the math um and then in addition to that when you're doing these practice problems you should really be using the practice problems that are the gold standard the best practice problems that you can get and so there's a limited resource for those good practice problems but the best ones sent to be the ones that the AMC that organization that makes the mccat uh creates so they give a set of practice questions that you can purchase through their website and those tend to be the most useful because they really give you a sense of what the chemp section is going to be like on the MCAT if you exhaust all of those questions there are some other sources that you can go to specifically there's a company called U world that has really good questions and there's a company called nexp that has pretty good uh practice exams and so you should always be relying on the best practice problems that you can I don't really recommend using too many of the prince interview or the Kaplan uh practice exams uh in addition to that when you do the practice problems I think sometimes students will do the practice problems look at their score and then walk away and you've kind of wasted the practice problems if you do that the whole point of the practice problems is not just to give yourself a sense of what the the MCAT should be like but to to figure out what you need to work on what your weaknesses are what your strengths are to learn from your mistakes and unless you go back and review every single problem that you got wrong or every problem that you weren't 100% sure on you're not going to gain those kind of side benefits of doing practice problems and so you should be going back and reviewing all of those problems and when you review those problems you should determine what your weaknesses are what topics what subjects you know are going to be uh difficult for you if you encounter them on the MCAT and you should really focus your time and energy on those specific topics so you can take those weaknesses and turn them into strength so here's my second tip so my second tip is that you really have to commit high yield content to memory uh Canen mention how that that earlier that this section is is unique and that has a lot of equations and constants that you have to memorize and so for every single one of my students I asked them to keep a running list of all the physics and chemistry equations in the front of their notebook uh these equations these are really like the toolkit that you have to work with uh on the MCAT and they're your best friend when you're taking the MCAT uh and for many students I think the struggle that they have when they're doing chemistry or physics problems is that they don't know what formulas they can work with on that specific problem uh and so you should be reviewing those formulas often and really really have them memorized because when you encounter a capacitor problem immediately you should know all the formulas for capacitors that you can work with it'd be really crazy to expect a carpenter or a plumber to do a job without knowing what tools they have on hand and the same way when you're doing a physics or chemistry problem you should know what equations you have uh that you can use to solve that problem uh in addition to that there's some other high yield topics that you should you should think about uh the really important biochemical Pathways tend to come up often on the ncat uh so these are like your glycolysis Krebs uh gluconeogenesis so make sure you have a really solid understanding of biochemical Pathways and then lastly what we've been seeing on the MCAT in the last few years is that it's trending more and more towards these experiment based passages where you're expected to analyze and evaluate the the data that somebody created from an experiment and so because of that you should really have a acute understanding of uh important lab techniques that that uh that important lab techniques in chemistry and and biochemistry and so for each of these lab techniques you should really know how they work you should know uh what they what they should be used for and you should know what kind of data that they can produce so that's my that's my second tip for for the mcad and my last tip for this topic is that you shouldn't just focus on high yield topics that there's some like uh message there's some like forums online that will tell you that there is some limited list of topics that you can just study and and that limited list is enough to do on the MCAT and that's absolutely a myth But Ken mentioned how it's really crazy that this one section has you know five different subjects uh that cover a wide breath of Science and you never really know what topics are going to appear on the MCAT uh in physics what topics in in organic chemistry or topics in Biochemistry will appear and so there's no like limited list of topics that you can rely on and I think the most common example of this that I see is that students will read the first chapter in their book they'll see that organic chemistry is just 15% the section they they hated organic chemistry when they took it in college and so they'll pretty much ignore organic chemistry and then they'll take the test and they'll come to regret it almost every time uh even something like organic chemistry that shouldn't represent a large portion of the questions on the exam will feel like it's very important in exam because a lot of the passages come with Organic structures uh even if many of the questions are from biochemistry and so you'll be encountering organic chemistry Concepts uh and organic structures all like all throughout this exam or all throughout the section of the exam uh and my last uh uh subheading under this tip is that when you study you should really be pointing out scientific connections that you see between subjects because that's what the MCAT likes to do on the exam that they like to take one passage and cover multiple different subjects within that one one passage so you might be doing a bio biology question a biochemistry question then you might jump to physics and chemistry and so like a classic example is uh like lenses if I have a passage on lenses I could ask you about the anatomy of the lens I could ask you about the biochemistry of the pigments within the lens I could ask you about the physics behind uh lenses and light and so when you every time you're studying a subject you could think you should be thinking about how can this subject connect to other subjects how can this topic within the subject connect to other subjects uh that are on this section and so those are my tips for doing really well on the kempis section of the MCAT all right thank you RAB and those are absolutely phenomenal tips and uh with regard to the list of topics to study for from MCAT um all of you at some point or or at some point in your studies should look over a document called the aamc MCAT content outlines that is a PDF document that is created by the AMC and it has a full list of every topic tested on the exam so certainly before you take your exam you want to go through that entire document and make sure that every topic listed you understand and you're familiar that topic okay so now let's talk a little bit about the car section what makes the car section so difficult so number one no content knowledge required right and at first this sounds fantastic you're you're like I don't have to study anything for the car section but that ends up not being true at all because at the same time it means that there isn't any content that you can study and feel prepared for for this section and that's because the car section isn't testing any content within the passage it's really testing your ability to think critically about the material and reason through the passage what was the author's argument what is the author's view on the topic right and what makes this section really challenging is that if you think about the Premed cours work that all of you will take towards applying for medical school most of these courses aren't going to teach you these skills right occasionally some of the reading and writing courses that you take you'll learned but for many students these aren skills that they ever learn in any of their courses and number three another reason why cards is tough is because it covers a huge variety of different topics in the past years now again you don't have to know any of these content you don't need to know anything about art or history or Linguistics to do one the card section but this is what also makes it a bit tough that because a lot of students are familiar with reading these topics they read a p Mage on philosophy and they're just so bored out of their mind when they're reading the passage and if if all you're thinking to yourself is this is so boring I don't want to read this then it's going to be very hard for you to do do well in the car section and the last thing that's also tough about cars is the time pressure right the passages in the car section are not short uh you have 90 minutes for nine passages which is basically uh 10 minutes per passage that this sound too bad but you have to read the passage and you have to complete questions associated with those passages so this section students often struggle with pacing here as well all right so now I'm G to pass it off to Katherine who's going to provide some excellent tips and strategies for the car section okay great thanks Ken so my first tip is that cars is kind of like strength training where you have to do a lot of work heavy lifting to see any increases in your score so what I mean by work is that you have to practice almost every day and definitely every day if you're way below your target score so my tip would be if you're pretty close one to two passages a day should suffice and if your goal score is very far away I would suggest doing even more than that depending on how far away and also a thing that I like to to do with my students but you can also do with some of your friends who are studying for the MCAT is have a teaching session where you bring a cars passage that you've done and reviewed and hand it to your friend and they'll have done the same thing and hand it to you and then once you finish the questions you'll teach each other the respective passages that you prepared and this type of teaching practice really gets you in the mind of the test maker and it makes you think critically about every single answer choice because you have to guide someone else to it so I highly recommend doing that and we can switch okay so next is who is the author so I love this question I love picturing my head who the author is because it's quite interesting if you're reading a very dull article on I don't know philosophy try imagining what this person looks like who's writing it try to get into their mind what made them want to write this they had to have a reason so if you try to empathize with the author it'll be a lot easier to read so next you want to look for a language of emphasis so if the author says undoubtedly surely especially that's where the author is shouting at you this is my opinion so that's the best place to look for how the author feels about something and then finally you need to figure out who the audiences so what kind of person would look this article up and actually want to read it that's what you're supposed to be so you have to read like you're that person and also just try to think of the reason that the author wrote the piece so what did they want to tell the audience that's very important too and that'll all help you get to the main idea of the passage okay and then highlighting Friend or Foe so students love the highlighting tool and that's great but when you start out I like to say if you've highlighted everything you have effectively highlighted nothing because everything on your page will be highlighted and that doesn't really help you find the information you need to answer questions so what I suggest to my students and I find to be very effective is read the whole sentence before you decide what's important or even better you can read the whole paragraph before you decide what's important and doing this will actually cause you to focus more on what you're reading think about the main ideas you're reading and then go back and reflect on the main ideas you're reading so the reading time will actually serve to help you answer the questions and get you in the mindset to answer them and lastly so reflect before you act so at the end of a passage don't stressfully just run the questions sit there for a few seconds and think about everything that you read and you want to come up in your head with one to two sentences of the whole main idea and I think that this is very effective because the answer choices will try to throw you off but if you already sat there and said this is the main idea you're more likely to get those types of questions right so those are all my tips I use these a lot with my students so I suggest that you try them out all right thank you Catherine and I also want to emphasize again if any of you have any questions any specific details that you're wondering about for the Kemp fiz or the car section again you know please feel free to use that Q&A feature and we'll be answering all those questions at the end of this presentation one other thing that I want to add about cars is that strategies are very important right so there's a lot of students who when they tacking the car section they're just like well I read the passage then I answer the questions right but I with when you see some of these strategies being applied and you see how effective they work you can really see how your approach to cars may not have been the best and when you start to learn these C strategies and you start to see your scores go up then you really start to believe in how effective these car strategies can be for raising your scores okay um and uh the last thing I just want to chat a bit about is uh how med school coach can help so of course we offer a complete mcap program we have fantastic MCAT tutors you've you know heard Katherine talk you've heard rashab talk if you want to work with you know tutors as qualified as rabber Catherine you know certainly consider working with us uh in addition to our fantastic tutor we also provide an excellent MCAT course that focuses on all the high deal topics covered on the MCAT the course is design designed by other premedical students that have all scored at 524 Plus in the mcap so you know again really really good scores and when it comes to MCAT tutoring this is something that we have figured out so when a student signs up with us they will complete an intake form so we learn information about their background their strengths their weaknesses and goals we use that information to pair up the student with a tutor that's going to be able to help the student reach their goals and during these tutoring sessions we'll help with content if needed we'll help with strategies will really help the student with whatever they need in order to get to their target score and and as a final point we have done quite well for our students so you can see our average score Improvement for our students is 10 points and that's really quite impressive so uh on this slide you can see some additional general information about our tutoring program we have a satisfaction guarantee we have a score increase guarantee we do very well to make our students happy and help them get to their target scores so if you have any questions about our tuing program feel free to email us at infilm medol coach.com you can of course also go to our website med school coach.com to learn about our mcap program so what I want to spend uh remaining time in our presentation then is to answer questions uh in the Q&A so uh we'll just go ahead and start going through these questions and uh if you have additional questions just go ahead and add them in and we will answer them as as they come in so uh first question why we have sha take this one how many practice tests do you recommend you might want to make sure your mic is on thank you Ken I appreciate that so this will vary from student to student but there is a minimum threshold that that you should be doing and that minimum threshold is four and a half exams and the reason I said four and a half is that the AMC offers uh four full length exams and a half of an exam called the guide questions and so everybody that takes the exam should at the very minimum do at least those four and a half exams and for most students that tends to be sufficient some students have extra time or or feel that they want a better gauge of what their score will be and if if that's the case then they can layer on additional practice exams all right so next uh Catherine you can take this one so the question is when starting content review for 10 fiz is it recommended to read two chapters that day and then do questions also how many questions per day do you recommend Okay so as far as two chapters a day goes it depends on if you're studying full-time or if you're also working or in classes so for an average student it takes about two hours to read thoroughly for a whole chapter so just keep that in mind so if you have four hours to study a day that's okay but then you need time for the questions and it's up to you how many questions you feel that you need to do and it depends on your goal score so if your goal score is very far away maybe you want to add in a set of you world questions after and do a lot of practice whereas for someone who's closer to their score maybe they just do the questions at the end of the book so this is something that you have to really think about the amount of time you have and then make sure that you're getting a good mix between the questions and the books yep perfect and also something that I want to add in here which is studying for the MCAT is not like completing a checklist so your approach should not be you know if I spend two hours reading a chapter every day if I do 50 practice questions every day you know that's going to guarantee me any score right so you know for many students the amount of practice you need the number of hours you need to study is going to depend on your own personal situation so uh in the end what's important is making sure that you are prepared uh for the MCAT to get your target score and the best way to do that is through practice tests if your practice tests aren't where they need to be then do more practice do more studies until you're able to get to your target score um we have a quick question here which is is inperson tutoring available so uh unfortunately we do not do in-person tutoring all of our tutoring is done uh online using online platform but I would say as someone who used to tutor people exclusively in person uh the online platform does have a lot of advantages over in-person tutoring something certainly worth considering R we can have another one here for you any suggestions on reviewing exams and practice proms efficiently all while leaving time to review them later yeah that's a great question so uh something that I'll start with i i emphasize this during the the presentation but you should review every single question that you either got wrong or that you weren't completely sure about when you took the exam so some students will only review the questions that that they got wrong um in addition to that something that that I emphasize to my students is that when you review the questions uh try to like read the explanations usually the book or the site the source that you're getting the questions from will have an explanation if the explanation doesn't make sense you should go ask a friend ask someone and see if the explanation makes sense but just knowing why that answer was correct is not enough you should also know why the other three answers were wrong and in addition you should take that that question as an opportunity to kind of identify maybe a gap in your knowledge or a weakness that you have and so let's say that you take a bunch of questions and you notice that I got like four asset based questions wrong in this section that's probably a really good indication that you should go back and review asset based chapters in your book you should go online and watch the asset based uh uh Con Academy videos that these questions are really there to guide your setting and guide your review and that's how you should treat them perfect all right so next uh Katherine if you want to take this one for students who have not taken courses in a long time so I I presume this is someone who as a non-traditional student um and someone who scored a 479 on a diagnostic test how would you go about reviewing content and integrating practice questions and yeah okay so good question and for a student like this I would really recommend that you start your MCAT studies very far in advance and this will give you time to adequately interact with the materials because you haven't seen them in such a long time and that means that you'll have extra time to learn every single Concept in a chemistry chapter whereas someone who just took chemistry a year ago might not need as much time on that one so starting early is a great place to start and then as far as questions goes you can perform the questions right along with your reading so so U world and next up have great resources for that where you can figure out exactly what the topic of the chapter is and then do questions on it so a longer study period is the biggest thing that I would recommend there all right and Rashad we have a question in the chat which is is KL the best content book or books yeah that's a good question so there's a lot of like book options out there uh most of my students use Kaplan but I don't think to be honest that it matters too much Kaplan is good Prince interview is good uh I think the most important thing is that you get a set of books and you read them cover to cover without ignoring any of the chapters or thinking that you know some of the the subjects well enough you can just skip it uh there is some uh contens is out there that I think Prince and review has the most detail so if you're someone that wants a lot of detail on the subject that Prince and review is is a good source uh there's another set of books called exam crackers that has the least detail and so if you're someone that has really struggled with these subjects in the past and really needs a really basic understanding uh and your score Target for that section might be a bit lower than you can use those but I think in general it doesn't matter too much which uh which book resource you use all right and Katherine uh here student is asking how do you recommend reviewing missed questions on the car section should you redo the whole passage or what should you do so re VI or redoing sorry I I think that's part of the question so how do you go about reviewing this questions and I guess the student is is wondering if maybe they should redo the whole passage okay I understand now so yeah that's a good question so the strategy that I recommend the most is that you do a cars passage you pause and then you review it in full and this means reviewing all the questions you got right and all the questions you got wrong and then after that you would want to look at all the answer choices so figure out why each answer choice that wasn't correct was wrong so there you have to do a lot of digging in the passage so the more you interact with the passage and critically think about the passage that's really what builds up those car skills and with regards to redoing the questions that isn't as beneficial because you'll probably remember the answers and there are plenty of cars PR practice questions or practice passages out there that can help you review for the future so I wouldn't recommend going back all right so uh here we have a fairly similar question which is uh what should I do if I am missing the same types of cards questions so I'll go ahead and take this one so it's true the card section while it doesn't test any content there are certain types of questions that tend to show up over and over again so for instance main idea or general purpose questions these are along the lines of what is the main idea of the passage what is the general purpose of the passage another example are weaken questions which of the following if true would weaken the author's argument would undermine the author's argument or structure questions why did the author include this particular sentence in this pass passage why did the author include this sentence why did author used this word so there are certain types of questions that show up over and over again and the first thing which you should do which I think it seems like you've already done which is great is identify if there is a common type of question that you keep missing you know if you keep missing analogy questions well first of all recognize that that is the type of question that always messes you up once you recognize that then you want to do a thorough anal of the an CH as Catherine was just mentioning the question that you selected that was incorrect why is that question Inc or why is that answer Choice incorrect right why is that a bad answer choice and also recognize the correct answer Choice why is the correct answer Choice what it is and sort of the pattern you want to be able to identify is what makes a good answer Choice what makes a bad anch choice so that way you're not falling from the same traps over and over again all right and here uh we have one that you can take with SH how do you suggest going over full length exams how long should it take I feel like I'm spending too much time on each exam yeah so I talked a little bit earlier about kind of my review strategy but in terms of how long it should take uh my recommendation my rule of thumb to most my students is that you should be spending about as much time reviewing the questions as you do taking the questions and so that means for one section with 59 questions on the science questions on the science sections it should take you about 95 minutes to take the questions and 95 minutes to review the questions and so with that being said uh when I say review I'm not just talking about like looking over read uh reading the questions and and reading the explanations that review not only uh means understanding why that answer is wrong and why the other answers are uh why that answer is correct and why the other answers are wrong but also identifying those weaknesses going back to your book going back to some videos and taking notes on those weaknesses and and reviewing those Concepts and so you should be lumping like both of them together that as you review the questions you should also be going back to your notes back to your books back to your uh whatever resource it is that you're using and and going back over the the content that you know uh you're week on great so here H Katherine we can have one for you should I take a class that focuses on critical thinking so that I can do better on the card section H that's an interesting question so I've never heard of a class that focuses on critical thinking so I wouldn't really know the merits of the class but the MCAT is all about critical thinking so there are better ways to learn the critical thinking which is just by doing mcap practice to see the way that the MCAT wants you to critically think but if it would increase your confidence and your critical thinking skills go ahead and take the class because it wouldn't be incredibly irrelevant it wouldn't it just wouldn't be the best critical thinking practice yeah and and I I concur with Katherine it can be a little tricky in terms of you know what what that critical thinking in that class actually involves is that the same type of critical thinking that you need for the MCAT so you know certainly can't hurt but you you just have to think about is that the best use of your time is it would it be better for you to uh take that that course or would it be better for you to just do more cars practice questions okay so uh next um all right so rash for a non-traditional applicant who needs a 20 point increase that's a lot would a jary 2020 test be possible um approximately eight to nine months of studying so I was a non-traditional applicant uh and took a few years out after after college um but what I will say is that for anybody uh even someone who's already scoring pretty well on the MCAT I think a 20 point increase is is going to be difficult and so not that it's impossible but it's it's definitely something that will require a lot of time and so I think the fact that you gave yourself eight to nine months is a good sign I think eight to nine months should be sufficient for most students there's like a balance there where some of my students if they wait way too long to take the exam they start forgetting the stuff that they studied like a year ago uh and so I think eight to nine months seems like a happy medium to me uh for someone that has a lot of review to do so yeah I I I think it is definitely possible but in addition to that there something I'll say is that it isn't just a guesswork that as you are studying you'll you'll be taking uh practice exams and you should be seeing score increases on your practice exam that are trending towards your target score and so like a month out two months out you should know whether or not you're you're on track whether or not you're going to be able to hit those targets that you you've kind of outlined for yourself and so regardless of what you do don't walk into the MCAT knowing that you're not going to get the score that you you need you should already know what score you're going to score the day like you know the weeks before you go into the MCAT uh because of your practice scores and that that should inform you whether or not you're ready to take the exam yep absolutely and just to add uh a 20 point increase sounds huge right and it is a very significant Improvement but it doesn't mean that it's not doable right usually these are the sorts of students who are starting with low scores right so for instance if you're starting at a 490 a 20 point increase is a 510 and that is certainly a very reasonable Target score and we have many students who achieve those sorts of 20o increases where things get tricky is you know if a student is come to coming to us and saying they want a 20 point increase in two months then you know that becomes challenging so eight to nine months very reasonable um so absolutely all right Catherine we have a question here which is uh let's see are the questions in MCAT review books like Kaplan a good place to start studying or should I use other resources that have questions closer to what would be on the MCAT yeah that's a great question so I know a lot of students use Kaplan books for their content but I really don't recommend the questions because they just don't emulate the exam in a way that I think is useful so I think that U world is probably the best source to go to for practice questions if not next step is also great but I would stay away from those kapan questions because they really aren't going to help you as much as for your time that you put in as those other questions right and and also just to to to emphasize that there are a lot of practice questions out there but a problem with a lot of those companies is that their practice questions were practice questions from the old MCAT so the MCAT changed in 2015 and rather than write new practice questions for the new MCAT many of those companies just recycled their questions and just kept using them for the new MCAT so that's why a lot of those questions aren't great and you wrot in Next Step these are companies that wrote questions exclusively for the new MCAT so they are better questions but also note that they aren't perfect either so that's why you know the AMC questions are always going to be the best because they're all from previous MCAT exams all right rad we have a question here how do you recommend skipping questions and coming back to them later I get worried that if I skip I have to spend time rereading or remembering what the passage was about yeah so it's always this like delicate balance on the exam I guess uh where sometimes you encounter a question you spent a minute or two on that question you're not making any Headway I think at that point you need to skip uh don't spend more than a couple minutes don't spend more than two minutes on a question knowing that you're not making progress and keep on trying at it unless you have time to spare and so in cases like this something that can really help is is taking notes especially for experiments uh you should be kind of what I like to do is for each paragraph kind of summarize that paragraph in one sentence and then for each uh figure each experiment that that they do in that in that set in that section of the passage I kind of summarize what the experiment's about uh and if you come back to it later more than likely using your notes and kind of the the memory that you already have from the the past that you shouldn't need to reread so when you encounter a question that is taking you a long time and you're not really feeling like you make progress you're making progress go ahead and skip it because it's not worth your time and if you have time to come back and review it rely on your notes all right so here we have a quick question is it easier to go from a 479 to a 500 or a 500 to a 510 so so this is a little tricky to answer because it's always going to be situational it depends on the student and now in this case there are differences one student is starting lower and looking for a larger Improvement the other one is starting at average and looking for a smaller Improvement so they're they're a little difficult to compare what I will say though is that generally the lower the score the lower the initial score in this case 479 the more room there is for improvement and the easier and the faster uh that improvements will be made and not just because often when a student comes to us with with these low scores there are so many different issues that we're able to identify and we can basically just start correcting them one by one so uh content strategy pacing and as you make each of these improvements One By One The Score just you know basically it's it's just like walking up the stairs it just continually increases When You Reach higher scores you know for instance uh when a student is out of 500 they're already doing a lot of the right things for their studies you know their pacing is pretty decent their content knowledge is pretty decent so now in order to further improve their scores they have to aim for those hard ler questions right that either require more content knowledge more advanced topics or they need better critical thinking skills and those harder questions can be harder to get right so it absolutely can be done but it's not so much like a lower scoring student where you can aim for those you know lwh hanging fruit to make quick easy improvements all right and uh here uh Catherine if you want to take this one for a student taking a gap year and wanting to dedicate time studying for the MCAT in what time span range is the most efficient to study in and how far away from the MCAT should the student start studying okay so that's a good question so as far as the Gap year goes it depends on when you're applying because if you took a gap year and you're hoping to apply that spring and only take one Gap year you would have to of course study in the spring until May or maybe early June but if you're taking two Gap years I would definitely recommend just doing a summer of studying um what I did I studied part-time from March until May and then I studied full-time from May until August but that was because I wanted a huge score increase and I was very dedicated so it does depend on what your goal score is but I'd say that if you have the time more time is better instead of trying to do three to four months you could try to do five to six months all right great so uh this is going to be all the time that we have so if you have more questions about the MCAT or how med school coach can help you please feel free to contact us at info@ medol coach.com check out our website medol coach.com also uh this webinar plus all the webinars that we host on uh cat preparation on USMLE exams comlex exams for medical students as well as medical school admissions uh looking at the application process interviewing and so forth all of these webinars we put on our YouTube page so certainly feel free to check out our med school coach YouTube page and uh you'll find a lot of great and fantastic resources so with that I wanted to thank everyone for attending and of course Katherine RHA for being fantastic host for this webinar bye guys thank you

Channel: MedSchoolCoach

Views: 23,314

Keywords: mcat CARS, mcat chem, mcat physics, mcat questions, medschoolcoach, medschoolcoach reviews, medschoolcoach llc, medschoolcoach reddit, medschoolcoach tutors, medschoolcoach review, medschoolcoach youtube, medschoolcoach step 2 ck reviews, medical school rankings, best medical schools, top medical schools, best medical schools in the world, med school, med school rankings, top medical schools in the world, good medical schools

Id: FVpQPblsUVo

Length: 62min 34sec (3754 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 21 2019