Regrets with Above Average Interview

[aldywood]

On 6/2/2020 at 8:22 AM, hopefullyme said:

Butterfly_ I'm planning on taking the MCAT this fall (studying with Kaplan & Khan academy) with very minimal science background (intro bio and chem) and I was wondering how long you prepped for the exam and what materials you used as a fellow non-sci student?

I wrote last summer and am from a non-science background. I took chemistry, biology and biochemistry as MOOC courses through edx.org (the MITx courses) - they are free but I paid for the certificate to keep me accountable and on track. The biochemistry With Professor Yaffe was incredibly useful. All of it was on the MCAT. There are some cerego flash cards in the Course resources that help master the amino acids which is so important for the MCAT (full name, 3 letter code, single letter code and structure). I also used khan academy a fair bit. I heard about uworld too late but many people rave about it. 

[technologymed]

On 6/2/2020 at 8:22 AM, hopefullyme said:

Butterfly_ I'm planning on taking the MCAT this fall (studying with Kaplan & Khan academy) with very minimal science background (intro bio and chem) and I was wondering how long you prepped for the exam and what materials you used as a fellow non-sci student?

I wrote the MCAT 2 years ago with this approach, Kaplan books and Khan Academy. I also had less MCAT science knowledge than most (1 chem course and 1st year physics as part of my degree). I would also recommend purchasing AAMC practice questions for CARS. Doing lots of practice there is what I attribute to a competitive CARS score.

[HongHongHong]

@technologymed I agree — the AAMC practice exams and question sets are super valuable: they use past questions and past scoring to give you results. I didn't really enjoy the 3rd party com now company's practice exams, I only did one and was like "waste of my time". I also got some used textbooks from Kaplan.... which were useless, honestly. Couldn't bring myself to study from them.

I found an MCAT Anki deck online and simply did that religiously. I also recommend people taking a look at the AAMC's official testable content list and flagging anything they haven't studied yet. Also note that your MCAT is scored relative to your testing cohort: if everyone is able to spend more time studying this summer (because of the pandemic), you better make sure you're one of those people putting in the more time or you'll be setting this yourself up for a bad time.