How I Got a 99th percentile on MCAT Chem/Phys

july of 2020 i took the mcat for the third time my first two attempts weren't great and it was because of the very first section the chemical and physical foundations of biological systems or mcat cp i needed to find some way to improve and it literally took three attempts for me to figure out the best way to study for this after working with the advice given by third-party sources that weren't the aamc sources i didn't see much improvement in the slightest of my practice exam but in that final month leading up to the third test day something had happened and i mean you've seen this title so clearly things change for the better now it's been almost two years since my mcat attempt and i'm going to break it down in this video so that you don't have to have the fear and anxiety that i had [Music] today i'm going to show you how i improved from the 52nd percentile to the 99th percentile for the mcat cp so you don't have to break open your skulls to figure this out just know that this video isn't sponsored by any sort of company i'm just going to show you what exactly i use in order to improve during my very first mcat attempt i remember going through all my lecture notes from college and then remaking notes that were based on the kaplan and blueprint textbooks it took about four months for me to finish my content review and i spent only about two months practicing for the first mcat exam i got my very first score back and let's just say i realized there was literally no point in creating all those notes and there was a point to practicing a lot more and so don't do what i did don't waste time writing and typing notes okay so given that i figured out what went wrong with my first mcat attempt and that it includes ncat cp i started to study for my second catatem i studied content review only through space repetition of several flashcards that have been already pre-made and so it started with anki for my cp content review i knew that a lot of pre-meds created these anki decks that were specifically designed for mcad content review studying in particular there was this deck called jack sparrow and i can link that down in the description below jack sparrow's anki deck covered literally every basic fact that was covered in the kaplan science textbooks and the khan academy psychology and sociology section of the mcat so i smashed that spacebar button for hundreds of cards every single day and i covered all the content reviews for cp and the other sciences in about a month oh and speaking of hitting that button go ahead down and hit that like button you know if you liked the content don't get me wrong i also did the content review for biochem and biology as well since i was covering all my bases for content review and so the entirety of the content review for my second mcat attempt took about two months learning from my mistakes after studying content review for the second test i practiced for about three months during the amc question banks doing u-world for any content gaps and taking the aamc practice exams for about a month out from test day all right it's test day i go in guns blazing i take my time for every question in cp and the other sections but mainly cp because i worked so hard for cp and i have time remaining to go back and check my answers did i do better the answer is no my mcat score wasn't better and it was because i didn't drastically improve my major sections i really worked hard for this one and i thought that my hard work would translate to the amount of success that i wanted i asked my peers how i could optimize my studying one thing i noticed was that my peers were spending a lot of time reviewing test questions which meant that they were spending a lot of time doing practice exams and practice questions so they finished content review in roughly the same amount of time about two months yet they didn't spend a huge chunk of time doing anki flash cards they might have spent some time on it but they spent a lot of time doing questions from a lot of third-party sources like uworld blueprint kaplan and then seeing how they would have answered those questions better to fill in their content gaps so i started to do the same except this time i started to modify everything mcat chem fizz is one of the toughest science sections because of the large breadth of content that you need to cover and with that it looks kind of daunting because chem fizz has so many subjects that they can pull concepts from each subject within the same passage this can cause anxiety because if you see something unfamiliar on the exam that increases the amount of stress here's why i'm saying this you've got to use optimal arousal theory this is literally a psych term you want to be in a state where you're comfortable emotionally physically and intellectually if we break down every single mcat subject we can break it down by topic if we break it down by topic we can identify where we're most deficient and that's what i did i identified my deficiency i started my content review by learning everything i didn't know if you want you can use the wronging method which is a concept that i actually talked about in a previous video i created wrongdes which basically just means any question or topic i don't i didn't understand so that i could learn it later and then for each subject i divided and conquered those wrong games but honestly the most helpful source for mcat content review was jack weston see jack weston has a website where you not only can access the subjects and topics for content review but you can literally start practicing to be mindful though as you shouldn't base your practicing just on jack weston they're not made by the test maker and are different and have different logic i'll get into that later also i kind of invested a lot of my time watching videos on khan academy and and for biology and biochemistry i use show moves biology i used to watch these videos when i was taking a break from studying i reviewed every single thing that i was deficient every single day on my review days i would go to jack weston and hit command f literally just go to the section that i was weak in and just read it and you don't need to be 100 perfect on the mcat there's not everything that gets asked on the exam don't take notes i said this in the earlier part of this video because there's no time there's not that much that you can do for a content review because there's so much material if you want you can just make new anki cards i would honestly just stick to using jack sparrow for anki review to substantiate your learning for the chem fizz section of the mcat took me about 20 days all the familiar stuff i already knew and all i had to do was cover my weakest areas by doing this i was able to progress in my content review and maintain a manageable level of stress and this is the optimal arousal theory i was maintaining an optimal level of stress now i'm going to talk about what i did right to elevate my test taking abilities and there's three components to this part of the video so i mean the first thing that i wanted to talk about is how i improved on my stamina for the exam so i practiced for about five months in total for my third attempt doing a certain amount of practice questions in a fixed amount of time every single day at the end of every week i took a practice exam in the five months i made sure to first complete any third party materials first like uworld jack weston kaplan princeton review and even blueprint and then do aamc material towards the end amc writes the test so you got to make sure that you address those questions last because then you you'll get used to the formatting and and the grammar and even the logic behind the test questions like i said to do well on this exam you need to do a butt ton of practice questions oh and one other thing that i didn't do was waste my time doing discrete questions because the vast majority of your questions on test day are passage-based questions so you have to do the questions that are based around those topics that you find deficient so this would be for one single day and i would do the same thing for cars bio and biochem like the third section and psych which would be the last section remember you can't neglect these sections of the mcat equally important in your in the entire exam after practicing i went over the stuff that i did wrong and i wrote it down i'd write down the topic in the form of a new wrongi and ask it in the form of a question i wouldn't just ask what the concept is but how it can connect to other topics and other concepts and i knew that in my earlier two attempts of the mcat that they love interweaving these different concepts together so i had a feeling that creating this mental network of information where topics are from different subjects would allow me to connect one another i remember not even memorizing the information i just all i really did was just read the stuff that i got wrong and understood the logic behind that the information was already there so if it's expressed in you world and jack west you just need to revisit it several times and if it was a tough concept i'd just simplify it and make a new anki card out of that because it was just too damn hard for me to mentally process and towards the end of the day right before bed i just reviewed everything that i got wrong i'd be able to sleep on it and consolidate all that information in my sleep so remember long term memory consolidation that's what we learned in sex social wow psych has really impacted me in profound ways now here comes the second thing which is properly dissecting passages for mcat chem fizz i want to make a separate video where i actually practice how to dissect passages and answer questions based on that when i started doing practice based questions i always had trouble approaching passages i used to spend a lot of time reading the entire passage with 100 concentration and then used to get lost in the details then in a desperate attempt at getting better i changed my strategy about a month from out from test day i came across this one video that was posted by this youtube channel called pre-med disciples in that video they break it down how to tackle tough research-based passages link in the description below after watching the video i changed my strategy by first spending about 20 seconds reading the first paragraph to get an understanding of what's happening by doing this i first got a sense of what kind of passage it is i was better able to formulate an effective way of comprehending the rest of the passage and tackling the questions differently in that video what i understood was that research-based passages generally talked about conducting experiments and presenting data to see if the experiment supports the hypothesis that video that i saw was a huge game changer i was able to make really meaningful annotations of the research-based passage and understand the study with about 80 proficiency i really recommend actually practicing how he annotates the passage i used to write out what's being studied the independent variable the dependent variable how the results worked what patterns were in the data and if i was able to generate a meaningful conclusion about the hypothesis that wasn't directly stated in the passage initially it takes a while to practice how to do this but when you invest a lot of time to learn how to do research-based passages you can apply yourself not just for the chem fifth section but also the biobiochem and the psychosocial section it really pays massive dividends but then what about textbook-based passages or passages that provided just general information were the authors just talking about some sort of background information about a topic or a phenomenon that happens in in the in nature and the human body like it could be a blurb about blood pressure taken out of a physiology textbook and boom that's your passage this threw me off my game yet again but it was a simple fix first of all this is why i spent 20 seconds just reading the first paragraph of every passage so i said that it takes about 20 seconds for me to determine what kind of passage this is that would mean that i would take another 10 seconds if this was a textbook passage i would take another 10 seconds to skim the rest of the passage and when i did this i was able to determine the trajectory the author was taking for that passage trust me on this one if you take the time or at least take the first 30 seconds or maybe 20 seconds to read the first paragraph and understand this over months and months and months you will be able to predict what kind of questions they'll be asking by determining what kind of broad trajectories the author is taking and remember this only takes about 30 to 45 seconds of your time dissecting passages is probably about 80 of the battle when you address passage-based questions all right a quick word on how to properly answer questions on the mcat after reading the passages i didn't really employ that many strategies for answering questions the only strategy that i really employed was process of elimination i mean there's so many out there that you can consult and if it works for you then go for it one thing that was helpful for me when i was answering the questions was rephrasing questions in such a way as i understood and in a way that allows me to grasp what the test makers is actually asking me because sometimes the test maker puts a whole paragraph of text and expects you to answer the question what i tend to do is just read the end of the question to see where the test maker is going and then look to keywords within the question to see how to formulate an answer and of course i direct myself to the portions of the passage that actually are relevant i mean another thing that is helpful is spotting out extreme answers the test makers love doing that especially the car section which i mean i can get into that later in another video usually the biggest difficulty if you're really good at test taking is when you boil it down to two answer choices and if you can't figure that out it doesn't mean that they're both good answer choices one has to be wrong there's only one good choice so it's essentially what you should do is not re-read the answer choices you should just reread the question because you've already put in the work of reading the passage eliminating all the answer choices that are wrong when it comes down to those last two questions always just boil it down to whatever's the least wrong so whatever's at least wrong and whatever is supported by the passage that's the one that is directly the answer you shouldn't be relying on a question if if finance choice is somewhat right and is a stretch then you should eliminate it immediately it's my hope that these experiences will really help you with your mcat preparation especially for chem fizz i hope this video has helped in allowing you to avoid some of the same mistakes that i made and also to use what i actually figured out while preparing so you can use it for your benefit also remember that 20 of your actual exam preparation is content review while the remaining 80 should be done exclusively for practicing those really dense passages i have several videos coming up that will show you how to effectively study for those other sections of the mcat and i can't wait to make those if you made it to the end of this video thank you very much for your support i greatly appreciate it and it's helping my channel grow i've definitely enjoyed making a lot of this content for you guys if you have any suggestions for more ideas in the future definitely put in the comments below like i said i probably will make videos of me practicing the mcat cars or mcat chem fizz section and other sections if you want me to address please consider subscribing if you want to see more content in the future and if you want to get notified hit that bell button go ahead oh wait you can do it alrighty and that's it i always like keeping it real with you peace

Channel: Student Dr. Shak

Views: 11,709

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Id: 8crfMGia3fw

Length: 13min 25sec (805 seconds)

Published: Fri May 27 2022