How do most pre-meds make notes from MCAT prep-books?

[precision]

bonjour,

 

How do most people make notes from the huge MCAT prep books such as The Princeton Review? Do you write everything that you don't know from each chapter? Do you just highlight the workbook and later reread everything that is highlighted for a refresher? Or do you only make condensed notes with like important equations, terms and concepts?

 

In high school and some of the 1st year university courses, I used to write notes that were 1/5 the number of pages of the chapter readings (because most of the stuff in those chapters were not going to be tested). With the MCAT books however, everything in each chapter is important so if I were to make notes out of them, my notes would be 4/5 the number of pages of the chapter readings. This will take a long time and some people I've seen only highlight their books. How do you guys learn by just highlighting? Practice?

I grew up writing notes from the textbooks but now I'm finding this time consuming for MCAT preparation and upper-year university courses.

 

What other methods of making notes are there? I even bought a text-scanner for intensive reading courses. I can't use this however, for some of the biology, chemistry, physics, and organic chemistry so I have to write the notes by hand. For this reason, I average 10 hours/chapter just writing the notes and about 2.5 hours to learn everything that I wrote for that chapter.(learn= know the chapter inside out, be able to teach someone the topics in the chapter without referring to the notes.)

 

With these notes that I make, I would not need to go back to the chapter readings. When reviewing, I just read the notes I made. So I basically write everything from the book. I don't like highlighting and reading from a textbook when I'm reviewing because I'm always thinking of how many pages I have left. "Oh Chapter 1 in the textbook is 40 pages long. I'll never finish rereading on time" "Oh but my notes are only 8 pages long. I can finish reviewing on time"

 

This problem will also carry on to med school with more course content. I'll definitely be using the text-scanner then.

[saltandpepper]

worry about the medical school later. get thru the mcat first as there will be no med school without mcat

 

well, i am a note taker myself too! i've always been... i read textbook thoroughly and make my own notes of what's important. and i study mostly with my notes after.

 

well, i read word by word through all tpr science books (and tried all the questions that they have in between the text) bio took me a month, orgo 1.5 week, chem and physics 1 week each. bio did take me 10 hours or even more for a chapter. if you have time and this is how you learn the best, go for it. but if you don't have the luxury of time, you will never get through all the materials... you would be better off with studying from the tpr notes instead (the notes from your class).. and just go back to the textbook with concepts that you don't really get. just my opinion. good luck precision

[Alchemist11]

Well what I normally do is I compress twice.

 

So I would read a chapter, and make notes on anything I didn't know, important formulas, things to note, and so forth.

 

Then, a week later, I would transcribe those notes onto OneNote, except I would remove the stuff that was obvious and so forth.

 

So you can get a chapter down to a few pages by hand, and then on OneNote shorten it even further.

 

That's basically how I do it - since you're constantly removing information and stuff it keeps you focused (e.g., "Oh do I need this? Oh this is obvious. Oh I better write this down I forgot about this equation") as well as making it so that your OneNote has only the most important information that you have trouble remembering and so forth.

[precision]

Thanks to everyone who replied so far.

 

It's good to know that I'm not the only one who writes study notes for 10+ hours/chapter. I guess some people just have to face the books longer than others to get the same grade. I can live with that.

 

To saltandpepper,

I can actually get into med school without an MCAT. University of Ottawa .

If I don't do well on the MCAT the first time around, I'll still have a chance at UofO.

 

I'll write the MCAT in May and I'm studying till April. I'll be taking full-time studies in the fall and winter semesters, thus I'll need to divide my time to both the undergrad courses and the MCAT. I'll use Christmas break, reading week, and holidays to study MCAT material hardcore. I was going to write the MCAT this September but organic chemistry (I'm taking it this summer) requires me to put in more effort than I expected. Also, not writing it this September won't hurt me at all because I'm going into second year. Instead, I decided to enhance my volunteer experience this summer.

[kkentm]

as someone who has never written notes for any university or high school classes, the note-taking i did for the mcat was a completely new experience for me. as you already mentioned, it can be challenging since most prep books are supposed to already contain very condensed material which may lead you to believe that everything in the book is important. thats where you need to make the distinction between information that is written in order for you to understand a topic and information that you must be able to recite cold (ie. key terms and definitions). in retrospect (i did not use this strategy), i think the suggestion that some people give of re-writing and condensing your notes over time is probably best. for instance, you may be tempted to write notes on certain mechanisms that you are unfamiliar with in your first read-through/note-taking. however, these mechanisms will soon come naturally to you and when this happens you can remove them from your notes in order to focus more on the end result. for example, when learning about cellular respiration you may not be initially familiar with the reduction reaction of NAD+ ----> NADH2 as well as the reverse. as a result, your notes may repetitively state the mechanism of action. however, when you re-write your notes you can remove all these simple explanations as long as you have mastered them and are sure they wont slip your mind. for instance, i can look at NADH2 and know that it is the reduced form of NAD+ which has the potential to generate ATP through oxidative phosphorylation and thus do not necessarily need the full explanation in my condensed notes.

 

i think i may have just written way too much to explain a very simple topic... i guess thats what happens when you drink too much coffee. anyways, if you are a note-taker i suggest you stick with the more detailed prep books such as kaplan and tpr. i remember attempting to make notes on EK books and had a much harder time doing so as it was harder for me to distinguish between what was necessary and unnecessary information

[kkentm]

just to add, it is very time consuming and maybe not the most efficient way of studying if you already have decent background knowledge on the subject. personally, i had background knowledge on maybe 10% of the biology section (pretty much whatever grade 11 bio covered) and thus i found notes to be essential to my learning. for the rest of the subjects, i either made very brief notes or none at all.