Someone HELP me

[bananabread1212]

I am on the verge of giving up. Idk what is wrong with me. I've studied the MCAT for 3 months straight and when I did an aamc test today I got 126/123/126/127.

I can't seem to improve in CARS and I can't seem to get anything higher than a 126 in the chem and bio sections. I'm writing the MCAT in roughly a month, any tips on how to get a 127/127/127/127 or is that impossible given that I have only a month left?

I'm just sooo scared for CARS, because if I don't meet the cutoffs, i cant even apply to mac or uoft. I've always hated english class, but I'm not esl so idk why i just cant get the questions right!

Anyone who only applied to ottawa and got in? I have a 3.99 first year gpa, and 4.0 second year gpa.

I'm just so sad cause i want to apply to at least 3 schools...  

[frenchpress]

47 minutes ago, bananabread1212 said:

I am on the verge of giving up. Idk what is wrong with me. I've studied the MCAT for 3 months straight and when I did an aamc test today I got 126/123/126/127.

I can't seem to improve in CARS and I can't seem to get anything higher than a 126 in the chem and bio sections. I'm writing the MCAT in roughly a month, any tips on how to get a 127/127/127/127 or is that impossible given that I have only a month left?

I'm just sooo scared for CARS, because if I don't meet the cutoffs, i cant even apply to mac or uoft. I've always hated english class, but I'm not esl so idk why i just cant get the questions right!

Anyone who only applied to ottawa and got in? I have a 3.99 first year gpa, and 4.0 second year gpa.

I'm just so sad cause i want to apply to at least 3 schools...  

Was this your first practice test, or have you been doing them this whole time?  What did you find challenging about the practice test? Were you short on time? Did you feel like you were getting the right answers only to discover at the end you got a lot of things wrong? Something else?

More generally, what materials and approaches have you been using to study for CARS and for the other sections over the last three months? It’s certainly not impossible for you to get 127s with another month of studying, but you’ll need to identify where / why you’re struggling so you can target and work on those things really directly.

[helicase]

1 hour ago, frenchpress said:

Was this your first practice test, or have you been doing them this whole time?  What did you find challenging about the practice test? Were you short on time? Did you feel like you were getting the right answers only to discover at the end you got a lot of things wrong? Something else?

More generally, what materials and approaches have you been using to study for CARS and for the other sections over the last three months? It’s certainly not impossible for you to get 127s with another month of studying, but you’ll need to identify where / why you’re struggling so you can target and work on those things really directly.

This so much. A big part of MCAT studying is constantly reflecting on why you're performing the way you're performing and then going back to tackle your weak spots. There's no 'one size fits all' approach to improvement.

[bananabread1212]

1 hour ago, frenchpress said:

Was this your first practice test, or have you been doing them this whole time?  What did you find challenging about the practice test? Were you short on time? Did you feel like you were getting the right answers only to discover at the end you got a lot of things wrong? Something else?

More generally, what materials and approaches have you been using to study for CARS and for the other sections over the last three months? It’s certainly not impossible for you to get 127s with another month of studying, but you’ll need to identify where / why you’re struggling so you can target and work on those things really directly.

This is actually my second aamc test. I got 126/124/125/129 on my first one. 

Do u have any god suggestions regarding the material i should be using to practice cars? Ive done all the aamc cars packages and did a lot of EK and TPR. 

[bananabread1212]

7 minutes ago, helicase said:

This so much. A big part of MCAT studying is constantly reflecting on why you're performing the way you're performing and then going back to tackle your weak spots. There's no 'one size fits all' approach to improvement.

True, i think i really need to spend some time reflecting

[heyhellohi]

1 hour ago, bananabread1212 said:

True, i think i really need to spend some time reflecting

Taking time to reflect on your practice tests is almost as important as actually doing the test.  Reflecting on the questions you got right, got wrong, got right by guessing, got right in a 50/50 situation, etc. are all important.  If I were you, moving forward, I would start to analyze all questions in a test after writing the test.  This will show you answering habits, etc.  You can even do this for tests you've already done.

Lastly, since you've identified CARS as your biggest weakness: put a larger emphasis on it for the remainder of studying time.  Don't stop studying the other sections, though - just do more CARS and find a strategy that works for you. 

[frenchpress]

4 hours ago, bananabread1212 said:

This is actually my second aamc test. I got 126/124/125/129 on my first one. 

Do u have any god suggestions regarding the material i should be using to practice cars? Ive done all the aamc cars packages and did a lot of EK and TPR. 

I really liked the next steps practice tests. I used their full length exams as well as their CARS book. The CARS book was on the hard side, but the information on different strategies was helpful for me to figure out how to approach it.

I would recommend that you start moving towards doing practice tests more regularly, and use those to guide your studying. Doing them under realistic timed conditions is also very helpful — e.g. dedicate your day to actually doing it with the breaks and timing as you would on the actual test day. This will help you develop time management skills, which are a key part of doing well on the exam.

3 hours ago, heyhellohi said:

Taking time to reflect on your practice tests is almost as important as actually doing the test.  Reflecting on the questions you got right, got wrong, got right by guessing, got right in a 50/50 situation, etc. are all important.  If I were you, moving forward, I would start to analyze all questions in a test after writing the test.  This will show you answering habits, etc.  You can even do this for tests you've already done.

Lastly, since you've identified CARS as your biggest weakness: put a larger emphasis on it for the remainder of studying time.  Don't stop studying the other sections, though - just do more CARS and find a strategy that works for you. 

This is very good advice. Practice tests won’t help you much if you don’t take the time to review them afterwards — it could easily take you 2x-3x as long as it took you to write the test as it does to review it and really understand where you went wrong.

A good system to consider might be something like: day 1, write a practice test and then maybe briefly review (but then give yourself a break to relax, you just wrote a test for like 6 hours!). Next 1-2 days, review in detail and pay careful attention to why you got questions wrong, and make notes about your weak concepts or areas in each category, bad habits in guessing, etc. Next 1-3 days, review weak areas a bit more generally and maybe do a few CARS passages for practice everyday. Then repeat.  As you get closer to the exam you may be able to decrease the number of days between practice tests you as you hone in on the areas on which you need the most review.

[heyhellohi]

5 hours ago, frenchpress said:

A good system to consider might be something like: day 1, write a practice test and then maybe briefly review (but then give yourself a break to relax, you just wrote a test for like 6 hours!). Next 1-2 days, review in detail and pay careful attention to why you got questions wrong, and make notes about your weak concepts or areas in each category, bad habits in guessing, etc. Next 1-3 days, review weak areas a bit more generally and maybe do a few CARS passages for practice everyday. Then repeat.  As you get closer to the exam you may be able to decrease the number of days between practice tests you as you hone in on the areas on which you need the most review.

2

I did something very similar to this!

Day 1: After the test, I would relax and take the rest of the day easy since writing the tests are very draining.  However, if there was something pressing/crucial that I didn't know, I would review it that day.
Day 2-3: Spend each day reviewing concepts I didn't know.  Usually day 2 was for phys/chem and day 3 was for bio/psych.
Day 4: Analyze my CARS section.  How many 50/50's did I get right/wrong? Why did I pick some 50/50's wrong? What style of passages/questions do I do good/bad on? etc. 

Usually, I was able to condense this process into 3 days (shortening concept review into 1 day) so I could fit in more practice tests before my real exam. 
Seeing CARS is your weakness, I would probably do a full length CARS section 1-2 times a weak (no more than that, though) and become super-aware of where your faults are and how to improve them.  This is truly the only way to increase your CARS score. 

Best of luck and pm me if you need any other help

[PFT22135]

I'm going to echo the advice above for reviewing your answers and why you got things wrong/right. This was far more helpful for me than even song the tests themselves. I only truly started to improve when I did this to identify my weaknesses and see where I could improve.