Kaplan Review 3rd Edition Sufficient.

[Chaplin]

I was wondering if someone could please comment on how well the Kaplan 7 Book review prepared you for the real MCAT? . I only had 9 weeks available to prepare for the MCAT due to work commitments ( 4-5 days/week) and could'nt go for a comprehensive studying strategy. I am using EK and NextStep for MCAT practice. Probably wont get to do practice FL's until about the week of the exam since I still have Gen Chem, Org Chem and Physics left to do.

Any response would be appreciated. Thanks

[frenchpress]

The Kaplan books have a lot of detail, which was really helpful for helping me understand the content. I liked them a lot. But they are on the detailed side for trying to cram just the 'need to know' info. I spent 10 weeks studying, and it took me roughly a week per book (except the CARS book, which I never opened) to review all the content in detail and learn about half of it from scratch. So be cautious about getting too sucked into extraneous info if you've got a lot of ground to cover.

I recommend starting with FLs now, even if you haven't finished reviewing (Or is this what you're doing with EK and NextStep, and you just meant you haven't done the AAMC official FLs? That wasn't clear to me). Try for 1 per week, especially if you can spend a whole day on the weekend doing it under exam conditions. This will help you figure out which details are important and which you can skip.  

[frenchpress]

I'll add that the books themselves don't really help you prep for the questions styles. The questions at the back were nothing at all like MCAT questions, so those weren't helpful for prep. And I never did Kaplan's FLs, so I can't comment on whether those were like the real exam. 

It was more that I found the books useful for learning the content. But I needed to do a lot of FLs and practice to help me direct my attention in terms of what content to focus on.