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Kaplan Books Quick Question


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I have heard excellent things about Kaplan books, they probably cover all the knowledge based material you need, but you also should get access to as many full length practice tests as you can (5+). Actually writing practice tests is a hugely important component of prepping for the length and style of the test.

As a side note: I've always heard of TPR and Kaplan being pretty equal. I studied exclusively with TPR and scored a 519 (98th percentile) and I wrote the test without taking any university biochem, psych, or sociology. I don't think it's at all necessary to buy more books if you already have TPR.

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I studied pretty much exclusively with the Kaplan books. I wrote the test with only 10-weeks of studying, and needing to learn a lot of content from scratch because I hadn't taken the courses, and did quite well (514).

I found they generally gave a good overview of the content, and had an appropriate level of detail on most concepts, which is typically not more details than you actually need to do most MCAT questions. But for some topics I was less familiar with (particularly some concepts in Biochem and physics) where I really felt I wanted to understand the concept, sometimes there wasn't enough detail. In those cases I used this giant TPR book I got from a friend or Khan Academy, as I found those resources provided more of the low-level details that I needed to fully grasp a concept and fill in the gaps.

If you want to make sure you cover everything, I recommend downloading the AAMC pdf of the entire exam content (from here https://students-residents.aamc.org/applying-medical-school/article/whats-mcat-exam/ ) and using that to guide your studying, instead of just covering all the content in whichever book you choose to use.  I used that PDF to guide what I was studying, and then I checked things off as I went. Then for topics on the list that I felt like weren't that well covered in Kaplan, I'd check them out in the other resources.

I agree with ^ that writing the actual practice tests is a really important study component. Learning the content is one thing, but being able to put it all together in the way the MCAT wants is a totally different skill you really need to practice. I thought the Kaplan practice questions at the end of the chapters were pretty useless for that purpose, but OK for an inital quiz for fact retention right after reading a chapter, and the Kaplan FL practice tests didn't feel all that representative of the MCAT thinking to me. The official AAMC and Next Step practice tests were a lot better.

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