Everything You Need to Know About Taking the MCAT Exam

[Music] [Music] the plan for the first hour or so we're gonna start first by talking about the unique format of the MCAT exam and really why this is the hardest pre-health exam that exists and that means the MCAT is harder than the DAT that Oh a T that peak at so all those exams for the different health science schools from there we're going to talk about the role of the MCAT in admissions and also chat about what is a good MCAT score so to start off the MCAT the first things you know is that the MCAT has four sections the first section is called the chem phys section and this is the abbreviated name we have for a canvas each section of the exam has a far longer name so the canvas section is also called the chemical and physical foundations of biological systems which you can tell is a much longer name by itself it doesn't really tell you much about this section so I want you break it down a little bit for you so the café's section from its name certainly you're going to have chemistry as well as physics but it's actually going to have quite a lot more so there are five different subjects that are covered in the chem fits section so you're going to have 30% general chemistry and at most academic institutions this is going to be either one or two semesters of general chemistry so topics covered are going to include atomic structure electronic structure solutions kinetics equilibrium acid-base electrochemistry and so forth next you have physics so you're gonna have 25% physics and at most schools this is going to be two semesters the first semester being Newtonian mechanics that's thinking about forces and mechanics work and energy the second semester is on electricity and magnetism next we have 25% biochemistry so biochemistry is also split so half of the biochemistry is going to be looking at the molecule so looking at amino acids carbohydrates lipids proteins Olding those topics the other half is going to be looking at biochemical pathways so glycolysis the Krebs cycle electron transport chain as well as the side pathways so gluconeogenesis glyco genesis glycogenolysis and so forth we also have 15% organic chemistry the organic chemistry is mostly gonna cover first semester topics I know that organic chemistry is a tough class for a lot of students a good thing is there's not a ton of organic chemistry it's not gonna be focused on memorizing reactions instead you're gonna be focusing on the general concepts and principles behind organic chemistry and finally we have 5% biology the next section we have is the cars section similarly the car section has a much longer name which is the critical analysis and reasoning skills section of the exam the section as you can probably imagine doesn't test any knowledge of science so there's no science content that you need to know for this section instead it's really testing your ability to read texts from social studies as well as humanities topics and think critically and answer questions about the text the third section is the bio biochem section also called the biological and biochemical foundations of living systems similar to the campus section I want to talk a little bit about the breakdown of the bio biochem section certainly you're gonna have biology and biochemistry and that's the majority of this section you're gonna have 65% biology and the biology according to the MCAT general biology is fine so if you take a year of general biology you should cover all the biology concepts tested on the exam however it just happens to be the case that if you only take general biology typically you won't have covered the material to the same level of detail that you need to know for the exam so that's why when it comes to biology the more advanced biology courses that you've taken the better so the most helpful is definitely physiology because if you've only taken general biology you really only go through the different organ systems not to much detail so physiology is helpful but really any the courses have you've taken cell biology microbiology cancer biology immunology microbiology genetics any advanced biology course is going to help next we have biochemistry so we have 25% biochemistry we also have 5% general chemistry as well as 5% organic chemistry and I'm gonna switch marker here 5% organic chemistry something that should be pretty apparent is when you're looking at the list of subjects covered in these two sections of the exam you notice that it's not all one subject there's actually quite a lot of different subjects that's tested simultaneously and this is going to be different for most of your pre-med courses in college not usually when you take a class and you take exams it's only on one subject and if you think about your courses probably in your freshman or sophomore year when you took general chemistry later on you took organic chemistry if you think about how much you need it from your general chemistry class for your organic chemistry class it was very very little right you could have almost not taken general chemistry at all and gone straight into organic chemistry and that's because general chemistry is very quantitative you're doing all these calculations and then you switch over to organic chemistry which is all drawing molecules and lines so they seem like very independent subjects but that's not how it's going to be tested on the exam on the exam you're going to have to be able to connect the different subjects together so an example would be in general chemistry you talked about acid-base chemistry so the difference between strong acids weak acids strong bases and weak bases in organic chemistry you're often looking at concepts like how does the structure of a molecule tell you about the stability of the molecule and that's very applicable and acid-base chemistry because what an acid donates a proton you're left with the conjugate base that has a full negative charge things that have a full charger on stable so to add organic chemistry you have to look at what features are in the structure of your molecule that can stabilize that phone negative charge so that could be things like resonance as well as induction so you really want to think about how you can connect the different subjects together the last section of the exam is the psych social section also called the psychological social and biological foundations of behavior this is the newest section of the exam and as a result we don't know as much about this section as the other sections so in this way it's a little bit of a mystery by this point the MCAT the new version of MCAT which was released in 2015 has been around for long enough that we have a pretty good idea of what's tested we know for sure that it's mostly psychology so you're gonna have v 65% psychology and you're gonna have 30% sociology and you're gonna have 5% biology the 5% biology is just that psychology has a lot of connections with psychology right or psychology has a lot of connections with biology specifically neuroscience so if you're thinking about how the brain is involved with psychology there are different brain structures that you should be able to relate to different psychological functions so this would be knowing things like the basal ganglia has structures like the nucleus accumbens as was the VTA that are involved with reward and addiction as was the amygdala is important for emotions and fear conditioning okay so those are four different sections of the exam and you also note that each section is quite long the three science sections are 95 minutes each the Carr section is 90 minutes long this is important to note because in total you're looking at a test day of seven and a half hours and most students are not used to an exam this long alright so that means endurance is a challenge on the MCAT and that's true of all students and the best way of getting around this is to take full-length practice exams essentially take these full-length exams so you can build up endurance where you can focus throughout the entire duration of the Sam next thing I want to chat about is the scoring system of the MCAT so there are four sections and each section is going to be scored between 118 through 132 so 118 being the lowest possible score and 132 being the highest score in the average being a 125 and this was designed very specifically by the writers of the MCAT exam to AMC and that's because if you have an average student that gets an average score of 125 in all four sections then you're left with a perfect 500 so that makes it very easy for admissions committees to look at a student's application and see if they're above average meaning their 500 or higher or of their below average of their score is in the 400s them count of course follows a normal distribution so that means most students are going to be somewhere in the middle around that average score of 500 and of course the higher the scored that you can get the higher your chances of getting into medical schools or into multiple medical schools or with various merit scholarships so certainly doing well on the MCAT is great for you the next thing about the MCAT is the different types of questions on the exam so I'm Ken is a multiple-choice test which again is going to be different from most college exams that in college when you take a physics exam or inorganic chemistry exam chances are it's not multiple choice right it's not how these topics that are usually tested in college they're usually free response exams where you're writing out Freebody diagrams or physics or drawing out arrow pushing mechanisms for Agana chemistry the MCAT is multiple-choice so there are some advantages here but at the same time the MCAT has found its own ways of making a multiple choice exam particularly tricky and we'll discuss this later on when we talk not only about the content you need to know about the exam but also its strategies and techniques that you can employ and certainly be able to recognize what are common features of trapinch choices that the MCAT always plans into their questions the next thing is as a multiple choice test every question is worth the same amount of points and there is no guessing penalty so that means you should never be leaving any questions blank on the MCAT and this last point is the most important one at all which is the MCAT is a combination of passage based questions as well as freestanding questions so freestanding questions are exactly what they're called as freestanding questions they're not associated with the passage they're standalone questions and they're mostly testing your memory do you know this scientific concept or not these questions are about 25% of the science sections the vast majority of the science sections seventy-five percent of the questions are passage based questions and this is what makes the MCAT harder than any other pre-health exam and that's simply because there's a lot of students who can do well in school they can get good grades they understand the concepts but they can still struggle with MCAT and that's just because the MCAT is in a test of rote memorization it's really an applications test where these passages will introduce new situations and new concepts that you've never learned about before and you're going to have to apply your knowledge of science to this new information to figure out the answers to the questions so that's what these passage based questions are all about and today we're going to do some practice passages lives you're going to be able to see how you should approach these passages and what the questions are like okay so finally test dates so we have people of various time periods right now who is planning on applying to medical school this summer or this upcoming summer all right pretty good number of people and for the people that are planning on playing this summer are you registered for the MCAT yet all right not as many people so you definitely want to make sure that you register for the MCAT soon perhaps it's not bad that you haven't registered yet because perhaps from this presentation you'll learn a little bit more about what is a good test date for you to select so in terms of the timeline for applying to medical school it's going to start around the first week of June that's when you can submit your applications but you can actually start working on your applications and May all right so may or june is when you to be working on and submitting your medical school application that means we're going to want to take care of your MCAT before that now in terms of testing you can see on this slide that the MCAT is offered between January through September it's not offered in the month of February I would say unless you've been studying very intensely for the MCAT for this past fall January might be a little tough but certainly you can still sign up for March April or May and that would not impact your application at all the reason why I'm talking about this is because one of the most common mistakes when applying to medical school is submitting a late application the earlier you submit your application the more seats are available and the less stringent the guidelines are for admissions and that's simply because if you apply in June you're competing for all the seats that are open if you're applying in July or August by the time your application gets reviewed half the seats or more may have already been filled so that means they're gonna be a little bit more picky with the students that they're evaluating now to make sure that your application is then delayed you do need to think about the MCAT and that's because even though the exam is completely multiple-choice the AMC takes about a month for you to get your scores so that would mean if you take the MCAT near the end of May let's say May 30th you're not going to get your MCAT score until near the end of June or the first week of July by then that's already going to delay your medical school application because the students can submit their applications in the first week of June now you won't be in the first batch of applications that medical schools evaluate so generally we recommend students to take the exam by May at the latest all right I said that exam that situation I gave earlier with May 30th it will delay your application but only very slightly because if you're still submitting your application near the end of June it's still considered fairly early in the cycle but certainly if you can take the exam in April or May then you don't have to worry about that delay at all and for those of you that are going to be applying to medical school this summer you should know that registration for spring test dates has already opened so I would highly encourage you to sign up as soon possible and that's because test dates and testing centers do fill up so if you haven't checked already you might want to see what is the closest testing center to where you live and where you want to take the m'kay and try to register it's possible that some of the test dates right now might be full so you might have to sign up to be on a waiting list for several locations but I wouldn't worry too much about that and not just because even if you're on the waiting list now students as test dates approach always have to push back their test dates so you're almost for sure going to be able to get the test date that you want as long as you're a little patient so next thing I want to chat about is the rule of the MCAT in admissions so since all of you're in this pre-med enrichment program I'm sure you've heard a bit about applying to medical school and the different experiences and numbers that you need to apply and certainly this is going to include your personal statement your letters of recommendation your experiences which would include research clinical and volunteer as well as any honors and awards that you've received now all of these aspects of your application are extremely important but one thing to note is that because they're not numbers they can't be filtered and while medical schools say that they review medical school applications holistically there is still to some degree of filtering when they're looking at numbers so this would be GPA as well as MCAT score so some of the goal that we recommend students when they're applying in medical school is of course you want to do the best that you can on the MCAT but what's really important is just making sure that your score is high enough that's going to at least to be evaluated by medical school because if you put in the time and effort to put in a solid application as long as you can get your application reviewed by schools then you're always you're already going to be halfway there and there's a good chance if you can get an interview with a strong application that if you do one the interview and that's going to be able to get you an offer letter the last thing I want to chat about is what is a good MCAT score and you can look at various numbers here so you can certainly see that earlier when I talked about MCAT scores the average MCAT school is around a 500 but of course the average pre-medical student can get into medical school and that's because each year about a hundred thousand students take the MCAT about 50,000 students apply to medical school and about 20,000 students will get acceptance letters so that means there has to be some sort of narrowing of the population of pre-medical students before they apply to medical school and the MCAT 500 that is the average score for some students that's going to be enough for other students that's not going to be enough so one thing that's good to consider when you're looking at what is a good MCAT score is to consider the two main numbers that medical schools will focus on which is going to be your GPA your GPA as well as your MCAT score and the data I have from here are from the most recent admissions data from the past couple years so you can see from 2017 to 2019 the different GPA and MCAT combinations of applicants and what percentage of them got admitted so you can see for example that students who have let's say a 3.4 GPA to 3.59 GPA and a 500 a 5/10 to a 513 MCAT they had about a fifty-two percent chance of admissions now this doesn't truly mean 52% really it just says that 52% of the applicants with these numbers got admitted into medical school now this is for all applicants so that means there are some differences so some differences are definitely going to include your background and that does include race as well as admissible I have is table 23 from the AMC and this is including all students I would highly encourage all of you at some point to go to the AMC website and look at the different tables for the different races and ethnicities and that's because the numbers are different whether you're Caucasian african-american Asian Hispanic Native American and so forth so that way you can get a better idea of based off your GPA as well as your experiences what would be a good MCAT score for you to okay any questions about the MCAT MCAT score he'll examine scored all right so in that case the next thing I want to talk about is more about how to study for the MCAT exam so the MCAT is a very daunting exam and when you're thinking about how to prepare for an exam there are a number of things that you have to be able to do and hopefully at this point you know a little bit about what you need to do to study for the exam as you've already seen was with what we have on the board now the science sections cover a lot of science content so the first step is you do want to make sure you know this science content so that would mean at a first step making sure that you've taken all these different peroxide courses general chemistry organic chemistry biochemistry physics biology psychology sociology and so forth the one course I really want to emphasize is biochemistry and that's because when you're looking at the two natural science sections of the exam you can see that the most tested subject is biology which makes sense if you want to become a physician there's a lot of biology and each no but you'll see that if you add up the percentages the second most test is subject after biology is biochemistry and a lot of students don't recognize this and when they get if I'm cat they're shocked at how much biochemistry questions they're seeing on the exam so definitely make sure you take those prereq or PSA's because if you take the courses when you're studying for the MCAT you're just reviewing those concepts if you haven't taken the courses then a lot of them you have to teach yourself which is much harder to do okay so that's the first thing you want to do when you're studying for the MCAT number one you need to know the content and for most students you've taken the courses that means the first step that you want to do is content review so by contouring review it means that you want to review all the science content that's tested on the exam sure you've taken all the prerequisite courses but it's been a while since you've taken some of those courses especially the early courses like general chemistry for some of you it might have been 2 3 4 5 or even more years ago and there's just a lot of content that you've forgotten the second thing that you want to do is practice and this is because as I said before the MCAT is not based on rote memorization so if you know the science concepts that's not going to be enough to get you a good MCAT score you need to learn how to apply your knowledge of science the MCAT questions and the best way to do that is through practice now when it comes to practice there's a variety of different practice questions that are available so I'm sure a lot of you have heard about the major companies like Kaplan Princeton Review maybe some of the smaller ones like exam trackers Berthier review next step and so forth all of these companies have practice questions but I'm going to tell you that these companies practice questions are not the best out there so the best packed practice questions available are those from the writers of the MCAT so that means if we want to say here for practice questions there's sort of two sources so the first is going to be a AMC practice questions the second is going to be from third party practice questions now the AMC these are the creators of Nam cat so all the practice questions that they've released are on previous and cat exams so they're all from previous MCAT exams that means these questions are going to be the closest to your actual exam and this does make a difference because while there are many third party practice questions and they allow you to purchase a lot of practice tests and often for a cheaper price than the AMC the third party practice questions are really just not as good as the AMC questions and there's several reasons for this so the first reason is when you take a practice test from a third-party practice company if it's a diagnostic test you're almost for sure gonna get a really really low score and it's gonna make you feel bad and make you really consider about the MCAT the reason why the test broke companies are doing this is because they're trying to scare students into thinking that they really need help and they have to purchase test prep from these companies but if you think about it that's not very helpful because what the companies are doing is they're just writing very very hard practice exams so if it's very hard then students don't do well and if they don't do well then they think they need to get help but if you talk to these test prep companies and you tell them like hey I heard that your practice tests are harder than the actual MCAT the response they're gonna tell you is well if you learn to practice with our practice exams that are harder when you take the MCAT since it's an easier exam you're gonna do awesome on the MCAT all right so their reasoning sounds pretty good but the problem is how they make their questions harder right so the way they make their questions harder is there's two different ways one way is just to make questions that are overly complex so then any of you have done practice questions and some of the MCAT review books especially for general chemistry and physics if you see any solutions for questions where the math is half a page long that is just way too much you're never gonna see that on an MCAT practice test the problem with that is if you spend all this time trying to figure out how to do all this math it's really a waste of your time and effort because you're spending all this time studying things that you don't have to do for the MCAT when instead the MCAT does test a lot of content that you need to know and your time could be much better spent doing things other than worry about those ridiculously hard practice questions the second reason or the second way that the test prep companies make their questions hard is they test exceptions so that means you probably heard before for some topics like electron configuration which is if you recall back in your general chemistry classes this is like your 1s2 2s2 2p6 3s2 you know that kind of thing most elements on the periodic table they're pretty easy you can just follow the periodic table and start from the applause with hydrogen and work your way down into the right to figure out what the electron configuration should be however there are a few exceptions so that means there are some elements that don't follow the basic rules and you probably recall these are some of the elements in the d 4 and D 9 columns with chromium and copper and they have an unusual electron configuration now tell you the MCAT does test electron configurations you do need to know what they are however the frequency that they will test these exceptions these anomalous electron configuration is less than 1% of the top all right so less than 1% of the time you're gonna see these types of questions show up if you look at a practice passage from a test prep company you're gonna see those exceptions show up two or three times in a single practice passage all right now now it might not seem like a bad thing you know if you know the general trends as well as the exceptions but the problem there is students fall for those questions all the time they always forget the exceptions so they get sort of stuck with this mindset that when I'm doing a practice question if the answer seems too obvious if it seems too easy then they think they're missing something and then they essentially overthink the question trying to figure out there must be some exception there and then they end up picking the wrong question or the wrong answer choice so the idea is the MCAT if you look at any individual question it's really quite fair there's nothing ridiculous about those questions that you're gonna see from test prep companies so as much as possible I highly encourage all of you to purchase access to the AAMC practice questions because these are gonna be the most valuable study resource you have for preparing for the MCAT and at the same time I would discourage you from doing the third party practice questions because some students think that they're good practice but if you spend too much time focusing on them they're actually gonna hurt your studies as opposed to helping you okay now this seems simple you're going to review the content you need to know for the exam and then you're going to do practice questions both of these are important but some of you are gonna have time constraints so if you have time constraints you need to be efficient with your studies you need to identify what are your weak areas that you need to focus on more and the stronger areas that you're better'n to spend less time on those subjects one thing that all of you should consider to doing at the beginning is to take a diagnostic test so a diagnostic test is helpful because you take a practice exam and you see how you're doing to start with now remember what I said earlier and we're going to do a diagnostic test make sure it's not from a third-party company because it's going to say that you need help with all four sections at the exam so when you take a diagnostic test take an AAMC practice exam because that's going to give you a very accurate reflection of your current standing with MCAT preparation now when you take that diagnostic test because it's a diagnostic test you for sure are not going to get the score that you want because you haven't really studied and that's completely fine that being said there are a couple important pieces information that you can gather number one the car suction the car suction doesn't test any science content so you can't make that excuse of oh I haven't studied at any science content for the car suction so the car section is going to be pretty reflective of how you're currently doing that section and the car section is very important and that's because there are some medical school admissions committees out there that believe that the cars section is the most important section so when there's looking at a student's MCAT score if they see high science scores and a really really low car score they're not going to be happy with that and that's a trap that some students fall into they think that when they apply to medical school it's the overall MCAT score that that's important but medical schools do look at the individual sections and better than having unbalanced sections where some sections are really high and some sections are really low as much as possible you want to have even scores across the board now it's pretty inevitable that some sections are going to be higher than others but you don't want the difference to be that much so that means if you're getting 126 127 in the science sections hopefully you're getting at least a 124 125 in cars so that way it's pretty comparable and it's not like a four or five point or more gap there all right so that's one part of the diagnostic test you're going to be able to see where you're starting with cars and the helpful information from this is there's a lot of students in several of you here that you're going to take that practice exam and your first car score is going to be a 126 127 128 one of those scores and if that's the case that's fantastic because there's a good chance that you don't have to do anything to prepare for the car section at all and that's fantastic that's one less section to worry about but that's not gonna be the case for all of you so that means for some of you you're gonna take the car section and your score is going to be below 125 it might even be a 120 121 122 if that's the case you want to keep that in mind and that's because when you're focusing on contravene when you're reviewing all the science content on the exam students tend to focus on studying science concepts and not enough on practice for the car section and when it comes to the car section because it's critical analysis and reasoning skills this isn't something that you can just cram for like the sciences so for the car section if you take a diagnostic test in your car score is low you do want to make sure that you are doing cars practice on a regular basis so that way by the time you finish your clock review for the science sections you've also been working on improving in that car such okay so that's one thing for a diagnostic test the other important thing for a diagnostic test is while you're not gonna be happy with your scores you're still going to be able to see some differences and that's because even though you probably think you've forgotten a lot of the science content you'll be surprised at how much of the science content you still retain and you can look at the difference between your scores so of your bio biochem scores of 125 126 and your tenth this score is a 121 122 that is pretty informative because they tell you that for lab bio section you we still remember most of the general concepts so for that section you mostly have to do light review focusing on the details that you've forgotten for us for the count this section if it's around 121 122 you're likely going to take need to take a more comprehensive approach they're really picking up your general chemistry organic chemistry physics and biochemistry book and as much as possible trying to read those books cover to cover okay all right so at a minimum that's what you want to do you want to do contour review and you want to do practice for practice you absolutely need to do the AAMC practice questions these are the most important practice questions available for third party practice questions you've probably heard from other peers that they did more practice tests than those from the AMC so it's not to say that the practice questions from third party companies you shouldn't do any however you need to be a little careful here and that's because the quality of third party practice questions from company to company is not the same so that means some companies practice questions are pretty bad and you don't want to do them some companies practice questions are very good and they're worthwhile to do they're not as good as the AMC but they can be good practice for you the companies that you don't want to do practice tests from are going to be the large companies so the large companies like Kaplan as well as the Princeton Review the reason why you don't want to do practice tests and practice questions from these companies is as you all are familiar with the MCAT went through a big change in 2015 or the exam format changed a lot if you look at these companies Kaplan and Princeton review before 2015 they had about 10 to 11 practice tests for the old MCAT exam when the new exam got released the 2015 they instantly had 10 to 11 practice to us and as you can probably figure out these test prep companies it's not like overnight they wrote tend to 11 new practice tests for the new MCAT exam rather they just recycled the practice questions the old exams and kept using them for the new exams and you don't want to be doing practice questions for an exam that you're not even preparing for so as much as possible avoid the large companies there are companies that created their practice questions brand new for the new MCAT so that means all the questions were written after 2015 when the new exam was launched those two companies you want to keep in mind number one is next step and number two is you world alright so if you want to purchase third-party practice questions next step in your world are the two companies that you should think about you world is really good for less science sections next step has full-length practice tests if science sections are your weaker areas I would recommend your world and that's because you world solutions are extremely thorough if you do a practice question no usually have a paragraph explaining why is answer choice a incorrect why is being correct why a see correct and why is the incorrect you world will have that but afterwards they'll have a full page going over what is the science content that you're expected to know for the MCAT and the science content in those solutions are very very thorough so they're very helpful for review but remember go back to what I said earlier AMC questions are the best so I'm saying good things about these two companies but if you're gonna purchase practice questions AMC is the most important of all and the third party practice questions there a second priority okay so Contras there are other sources that many of you have probably heard about before so one of them being Khan Academy MCAT videos so Khan Academy videos are a good source but these I consider supplemental resources right so here we'll say supplemental so buy supplemental resources that means that these resources are helpful but they can't replace practice as well as contra review so one of these resources is gonna be MCAT videos now I'm putting MCAT videos instead of Khan Academy here because Khan Academy is the most well-known source of MCAT videos and they're fantastic they probably have over a thousand videos on science content that students need to know for an MCAT but the reason why it's supplemental and can't replace your contra View is because the Khan Academy videos are not comprehensive so what I mean by that is if you watch all 1,000 Khan Academy MCAT videos when you get to the AMC practice questions and practice to us you're still going to run into a lot of science concepts in terms that you didn't even know that you needed to know from the Khan Academy videos so you don't want to rely completely on MCAT videos for your contribution from test prep companies and I didn't talk about this earlier but a question I get all the time from students is which set of books should I get should I get Kaplan Princeton Review exam crackers next step and so forth and the first thing I'm going to tell you is the set of books is not important and that's simply because there are students who have used the Princeton Review book books and gotten fantastic MCAT scores they're students who have used the Kaplan ebooks and gotten fantastic MCAT scores and you can say the same thing for exam crackers Berkeley review next-step gold standard out yes every set of MCAT books out there students have used them and gotten fantastic MCAT scores the difference and the important aspect of books is not the set of books that you have but how you use the books because you can also say there are students that have purchased access to every set of books and also gotten bad MCAT scores so the way you don't want to use your books is let them sit on the shelf and collect dust that's definitely not going to help you when you're using your books you really want to be as comprehensive as you can really read the book from cover to cover page to page and I know that reading textbooks can be really hard to do I know that can be really boring but this is what makes the difference because the average pre-medical student is good at studying but good at studying reading textbooks it's not the same thing reading textbooks are hard to do but if you're able to do what the average pre-medical student struggles to do which is read those books that's what's going to be able to push you to those higher MCAT scores so as much as possible I encourage you to read your MCAT books and again company's not too important they're going back to MCAT videos I mentioned Khan Academy videos there are a bunch of companies with videos out there Khan Academy you'll find a lot of good videos but these days there are so many companies that have released science videos and the way you want to use videos is not to use them to comprehensively review content but rather if there's a particular topic that you struggle a lot with right so for example if you never understood the immune system you know what's going on with the B cells and the T cells and all that what I'd encourage you to do go to YouTube type in immune system B cells and T cells and you're gonna see a whole bunch of videos on that topic some of them might be from Khan Academy and that's great but there's a bunch of other videos from companies other than Khan Academy that have great videos and can really help with your understanding of those topics other supplemental resources flash cards as well as study guides now this is really just a way of helping students to review information so some students prefer flashcards other students just prefer study guides they can have the same exact information it's almost just a difference in the format is the format on individual cards or is it just a bunch of lines on one page it's really personal preference here if you like flashcards great if you prefer study guides that's completely fine too what I would say that you do not want to do is to use someone else's flashcards or study guides I know that this is very tempting for a lot of students and if any of you spend a lot of time on the online pre-med communities like the MCAT subreddit page as well as sdn there are some flashcards that are around that are pretty famous right there's the like the unki 528 flashcards so it's a student who got a 528 a perfect score on the MCAT and they shared their Anki flashcards it's like 3,000 flashcards so a lot of students they think oh if I reviewed these 3000 flashcards I'm also going to get a 528 which obviously doesn't work that way and that's because if you start flipping through those flashcards you're gonna instantly find a bunch of cards that do not make sense at all right you look at one side you look at the definition you're like I have no idea what this card is talking about and that's because the person who made the card they were trying to remember some concept or some mnemonic specific to them and unless you made those card yourself you're not going to understand those cards so they're great to use flash cards and study guides to help memorize certain content topics for the MCAT but you want to make your own as much as possible and part of it is if you're making a flashcard or a study guide part of it is already having you to think about the content about how you can break it down in simple terms and the more that you're thinking about the concepts the better your understanding of the material is going to be so they're good to use but make sure you're creating your own okay any questions so far about how to study for the MCAT anything by having dress addressed in terms of certain materials or resources or questions that you have yes everybody pull out there they only read one mm-hmm there is one and two so living fish or four want to take back into his will or just to yeah so that's an excellent question right and this is gonna be true not just for biochemistry but also some of the biology topics right so medical schools only require one year of general biology but if you've taken Physiology or other advanced biology courses those will help too so there's not a perfect solution here all right so the things for you to think about number one if you take biochemistry 2 then certainly you're going to know more content for the MCAT which is gonna make studying for the MCAT easier but things not you have to think about is that's another course that you have to take biochemistry is often not an easy course so if it's not an easy course you want to risk that you know potentially hurting your GPA or do you want to let that course possibly delay your application right because maybe you can take in the spring and that's fine but if you can't take in the spring if you have to wait till next year and wait another cycle so essentially you can't really pick a wrong decision here because both have their each option has its pros as well as its cons I think what tends to be the most useful is to ask other upperclassmen and not just because at different schools biochemistry is offered in different ways so that means in some schools the first semester biochemistry covers the vast majority of all the concepts tested on the exam and the second semester maybe only 20% of the concepts are relevant at other schools both semesters are equally relevant so the easiest way to figure that out is to ask other classmates at your school that have already taken one or both courses and maybe also MCAD and ask them how valuable would it be for you to take biochemistry - yes yeah the specific topics for each of the subjects are there certain ones that you're wondering about mm-hmm yeah yes so there's a document and we can add that under the Supplemental resources this is the AAMC MCAT content outline so the AMC MCAT content outline I'm also going to pull a copy of this on my laptop here so all of you can see what it looks like it is a document created by the AMC and it has a full list of every topic that is tested on the MCAT exam ok and then let's see if I can share this okay so this is the AMC MCAT content outline you can see what is the MCAT 2015 exam it doesn't mean this is for four years ago the current exam is the 2015 exam with the exam changed this document will go through introductions of the sections but the key thing is when you scroll through you're going to get to a point where it's gonna say the content categories they'll tell you fun foundational concept one it's on biomolecules and four biomolecules you need to know structure and function of proteins how genetic information is transmitted as well as inherited and also four foundational concepts to three and all of the foundational concepts when you go further it's going to give you additional details so that means four foundational concept one it even has four categories right 1a 1b 1c 1d and then you can see that for content category 1a no tell you for amino acids you have to describe them in terms of their absolute configuration you need to know how they work as dipolar or Twitter ions you need to be able to classify them as acidic basic polar or nonpolar so this is a document that you can definitely check out to get this information one thing that's a little tricky though is that this doesn't tell you everything that you need to know and not just because it's not comprehensive so some examples that we can see is if we just scroll down further especially for the psych social section and psych so just really hard because this is the newest section of the exam you'll see that for some topics like observational learning oh it has AZ modeling but it's so vague what what is modeling refer to with observational learning right or other things that would just say the elaboration likelihood model but the lab eration likelihood model there's so much in details that you could go into so it's really tough to know how much do you need to know for each topic based on the out now the way you want to use it is at some point when you finish your contour interview when you're starting to do your practice questions definitely go through this document you want to go through every page I know this is a 100 twenty-eight page document so it sounds very long but you're not gonna go through it like super carefully rather you just wanted to scroll through the document be like okay do I know this topic do I know this topic do I know this topic and if there's any topics that you haven't heard about before now you want to highlight it or write it down so you make sure that you know you go to google you look up that topic make sure you're familiar with it so that way at least you're familiar with everything and in terms of the details hopefully the amount that you've reviewed for that topic is going to be enough okay other questions yes yeah so this is where there's some differences so remember why I said earlier the psychs which section is the newest section so because of that we know the least about the suction the count is the cars in bio biochem suction these were not only on the current exam but they're also on the old exam and because they've had so many practice tests that have been released we have a really really really good understanding of what do you need to know for general chemistry organic chemistry physics biology so for these topics if you go with your MCAT books whatever level of detail you have in those books are going to be fine for less like so suction this is where it's trickier because we don't have a full understanding of what they what we need to know and that's simply because number one the content outline isn't very detailed and number two they haven't released enough questions letting us know everything that we need to know for the exam so by that what I mean is if you look at the psych Scioscia of the AMC Clinton outline not every topic has been tested on the MCAT so far right so that becomes very tricky for us because if it hasn't even show up on an MCAT before we don't know how they're going to test students on it so now that being said how important is that going to be well I would actually say it's probably not that big of a deal because if you go with your MCAT books if you read your books you're already doing more studying than the average students so whatever content they have if you've read the books you have more knowledge and understanding than they do and the MCAT ultimately is going to have a normal distribution so as long as you're doing better than those other students you're going to be fine

Channel: MedSchoolCoach

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Keywords: mcat, how to study for the mcat, mcat exam, how to do well on the mcat, mcat tips, ace the mcat, mcat practice exams, how to study for mcat, mcat test, how to mcat, all about the mcat, tips to ace the mcat, how to kill the mcat, how to pass the new mcat, guide to doing well on the mcat', how to ace the mcat, how to pass the mcat, mcat study schedule, how to cram for the mcat

Id: f5RfBEIspc4

Length: 52min 29sec (3149 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 18 2019