My General MCAT Advice…

Look, it’s true that there are certain topics that are less likely to show up on your exam, but that doesn’t mean that they can’t/won’t show up. The content you need to know for the exam fits into two categories: it will show up, or it won’t.

For example, being able to calculate the number of Big Macs that would fit inside the sun? Not going to show up. Being able to calculate the value of the electric field potential near a dipole? Not going to show up (unless they give you the equation in the passage). Knowing the difference between electrolytic and galvanic cells? Absolutely can show up. The latter is probably what most people would consider to be “high-yield”, which is great, but that’s not the point I’m trying to get at here. There are definitely things that are more important to study than others, but again, I’m trying to demonstrate a point that doesn’t really talk about what content is high vs low-yield.

The list of content that might show up on the exam as well as the % likelihood that it actually might show up is based on an entire year long trend. There are tons of testing dates, and different forms on each date, so while maybe only 1% of exams might have asked about Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, maybe those that did had several questions on it. If you dismissed studying the surface level of Heisenberg’s purely because it was considered “low-yield”, you just screwed yourself out of missing a few questions. Just because something doesn’t show up that often in a year and is considered “low-yield” doesn’t mean it will be low-yield on your exam!

So while I can’t guarantee what “low yield” content will show up on your exam,

Just because your exam had a lot of OChem doesn’t mean that someone else’s will. Just because your exam had a lot of physics doesn’t mean that someone else’s will. The simple fact that we don’t know whether or not a certain topic will show up I’m hoping is enough to convince you that it’s at least worth studying “low-yield” topics. We know on average, over the course of a year, what shows up on the exams, but that doesn’t mean we know exactly what will show up on your exam. So it’s best to be prepared for anything!

Scoring plateaus or even decreases are incredibly common. This exam is most likely like none other that you’ve ever taken, and over the course of months of studying, you’re going to undergo lulls in your progress. And that’s perfectly ok and normal!

My biggest piece of advice for people who are experiencing something like this is simply to take a day off. You’re essentially training for a marathon, and 9/10 times a plateau or decrease happens it’s because you’re working yourself way too hard and not taking your practice exams in accurate conditions for what you’ll be doing on the real deal. Your brain is going to need a rest day here and there in order to truly have stamina for studying for the exam. More importantly, most people when they’re taking the practice exams do not do so in a manner that simulates their testing conditions. They’re taking them later in the day, sometimes on weekdays after classes, or having studied the full day before as well, which means they’re going to be dead tired for their actual practice exam. Whenever you do take practice exams, the time of day you take the practice exam is important, as is what you do the day before. Ideally, you won’t do anything the day before your exam, so you shouldn’t be doing much the day before a practice exam either. Consistency is key, and your brain needs a break!

So take a damn break!

If you’re still having issues with a scoring plateau, change something up. Try out a different strategy, evaluate your exams in a way that looks to identify patterns in the questions you’re missing, study at a different time of day, etc. Simply by trying something new you may either find new momentum or discover something that had previously been a hinderance in your normal test taking strategies. Go read up on my recommended ways to review exams and practice for more info on how this can help identify continuing problems!

There are two main things that I recommend doing whenever going through practice problems.

The first is identifying why you got a question right or wrong.

Don’t just review the questions you got wrong, at least glance through every single question. It’s possible you guessed on one and still got it right! Especially if you were clueless on a question or you got it wrong, identify if you got it wrong because you didn’t understand the passage, you didn’t understand what the question was looking for, or was it the something in the answer choices that got you.

• If you missed a question because of a fundamental misunderstanding of the passage, this is the hardest problem to fix. I highly recommend watching some YouTube videos of tips for going through the passages of the various sections, as well as checking out my Section Specific advice, but the only broad advice that I can give to people in this scenario is to heavily increase how much you’re doing practice passages. There’s many smaller bits of advice I have, like if you keep missing questions based on a graph, you’re probably not understanding the axes or you’re confusing a correlation with a causation, but those smaller tips for passage skills are way too numerous for me to list out here, which is why I tried to do so in my Section Specific advice. Long story short, try something new! If you keep failing to understand passages, go find a new strategy somewhere that may simplify how to approach that section and try it out until something sticks. Feel free to reach out to me in my Contact Form if you’re completely lost and I can try to help out as much as possible to give more specific advice!

• If you missed a question due to the nature of the question itself, ask yourself, did you simply not understand what the question was asking, or did you pick an answer choice that didn’t actually answer the question? If it’s the latter, look at my advice below for issues with answer choices. If it’s the former, one of the skills that I developed was putting the questions into my own words. The questions on the MCAT tend to get pretty wordy and fluffy, but at the heart, there’s a really simple question to be asked. They may talk about some inhibitor that does this in females and this in males and has a weight of this and acts this way in SDS PAGE but then the heart of their question simply is something like, “which amino acid is polar?”. If you try to put the heart of each question into your own words, and potentially even literally write it down, you’re going to get better at seeing through the smoke screen to pick out the simple question that’s hidden. Sometimes it helps to read through the answer choices as they may provide a bit of context for what the question is asking.

• If you missed a question due to something going wrong with the answer choices, try implementing my system of 4 questions that I ask myself all the time with MCAT answer choices (in this order): Is this choice factually correct? Does it actually answer the question? If there’s a passage, does the answer choice relate to the info in the passage? And how specific is the answer choice, is it vague or specific? I basically use these questions to help compare the answer choices to each other to find the best answer choice. Your job on the MCAT is not to pick a correct answer choice, it’s to pick the best answer choice. There may be an answer choice that is scientifically correct but it doesn’t answer the question, or it doesn’t really relate to the passage that well, so it’s a worse answer choice than something that satisfies all of those points. Going through questions either while you’re practicing or reviewing your problems and asking yourself one of those 4 questions will help you avoid making mistakes and it will also pretty quickly identify what went wrong when you were picking answer choices. Always compare the answer choices to each other! Pick the best one! Additionally, never pick an answer choice that is factually incorrect! Sounds dumb, but you’d be surprised how often you end up talking yourself into an answer choice that is outright false from the get-go on this exam!

Since the med school application process is indeed holistic, your MCAT score won’t define you as an applicant, but it will be what at least gets you in the door. If you click here, there’s data released by the AAMC that shows what percent of students matriculated into medical schools with different combinations of MCAT scores and GPAs. This should not be the only thing that defines your decision to retake or not, but it’s at least a start. Please also note that your race/ethnicity does play a role into what score you should be looking for as well (link to data released by the AAMC about MCAT scores, GPAs, and race information for matriculants).

If you feel like the odds of you getting in based on all of that information is still not great, then it’s probably time to consider a retake. Keep in mind, all it takes is one school to say yes, but it’s entirely up to you on deciding whether or not you think it’s worth the risk of spending money on applications or money on an MCAT retake.

One other note, medical schools are not going to judge you for retaking the exam, in fact most students do!

For most people, your scores are going to be deflated (lower) on third party exams than compared to what you’d be scoring on the AAMC. This is for a few reasons, the exams tend to be somewhat significantly harder, they don’t have the same score scaling, and they tend to do that on purpose so you take your sign of having a lower score as one to sign up for one of their courses to improve your score.

So with all of that being said, it’s generally best to use the exams as a good way to track scoring trends, but not your true score. I typically recommend people try to implement 1-2 AAMC exams during their time taking the 3rd party exams just so they have a good idea of where their scores align between 3rd party and “real deal”.

Typically, your scores are going to be deflated anywhere from around 3-11 points, and since that’s such a big range, it’s just not really worth trying to decide how close you are to your goal score via 3rd party exams. You can track improvement in your score through increases/decreases to your score, but not the actual value of your score.

I’m going to turn this into a bullet-pointed list of advice on how to best study so that you can pick and choose which bits and pieces of information you think will work for you out of it.

• When reviewing content, try to do just a few practice problems of whatever subject you’re studying right after reviewing your flashcards/watching a YouTube video. Practice is going to be the best way you’ll integrate information and will at least start your brain at thinking of the information in terms of “how are they going to ask about this” rather than simply “ok, this is what this is”. I recommend using things like UWorld or Khan Academy for things like this since they have questions separated based on scientific topic.

• Start your day with a bit of Anki review. If you’re still in your content-reviewing phase, this will be a much longer block than if you’re in your practicing phase.

• Content review/flashcards should never stop. Even right up until your exam you should keep trying to use your anki decks or whatever you do to review content as constant reminders of the content you need to know for the MCAT. There’s enough information on this exam that if you only go through the cards once and then never again, you’ll forget the vast majority of them.

• Try to study a new topic every day if you feel like you’re getting behind. Especially if you’re using Anki, it can absolutely feel like your reviews are piling up and you’re not getting anywhere. I typically would separate my Anki/flashcard studying into two groups: a new topic for the day, and reviews, that way I could get both done. Additionally, I would typically rotate scientific subjects as well (when pulling up new information/cards, not when reviewing) to make sure I wasn’t falling behind in one subject or the other. For example, I did Biology on Mondays, Chemistry on Tuesdays, Physics on Wednesdays, and Biochemistry on Thursdays. Pretty much sprinkled in some P/S on every day as well.

• When you get into a much heavier practice phase, still start off the day by doing a bit of review in your Anki decks, do the practice, add extra cards to your deck about content gaps you missed in your practice or other things you misunderstood, then do another quick pass over that deck to reiterate the info. This should really help you gain many exposures to certain topics at the same time that you’re trying to answer questions about them which really helped me integrate info.

• Try doing content review later at night. Some studies have shown that your brain is better at consolidating short-term memories into long-term for events that happen right before bed, so it may be worth trying to study your flashcards right before bed if nothing else is working.

• Do CARS every single day. It doesn’t have to be 9 full passages, you can do 1-3 a day and then maybe one long block a week, but do it every day, and start doing it earlier in your study progress rather than later. Give yourself as much time as possible to try out different strategies, track your progress, and find consistencies in the mistakes you’re making, which is much easier to do if you’re doing CARS daily rather than once a week or not at all until shortly before your exam. It absolutely sucks, but it’ll suck less if you’re doing well.

At this point, you should be in full triage mode, heavily directing your practice towards whatever is giving you the most trouble, as well as making sure you still don’t have any content gaps in things. Like I’ve mentioned before, content review never stops, and I found myself ramping up how many cards I was reviewing per day quite a bit the last week before my exam. By this point, your exam score is close to set in stone (to an extent), and I personally just preferred to avoid losing any easy points by ensuring my content knowledge.

I also highly recommend fully taking the day before your exam off. Go on a walk, go watch a movie, just eat healthy food and go to bed at a normal time. If you’re anxious, sure maybe do a few flashcards, but I highly recommend using your brain as little as possible the day before your exam. This exam is a marathon, and marathon runners don’t try to run marathons the day before their marathon. By this point, studying the day before your exam has a super slim chance of dramatically improving your score on exam day but has a larger potentially of decreasing your score by tiring you out.

Take a damn break!

Not particularly, but I recommend taking the most recent exam (FL5, aka the “Free Scored Exam”) from the AAMC somewhere around 3-4 weeks before your exam. The main reason for this is it’s the most difficult exam that we’re given and is the closest to the actual difficulty of the real deal. I have had students that didn’t take it until the week of their exam and were freaked out because they weren’t super prepared for the difficulty of the section (even though their score didn’t dramatically change because the exams are scaled to difficulty), and I’ve also had students that started off with that exam and expressed to me that they had gotten more used to the easier nature of some of the older exams by the time their real exam came by. Basically, it’s like ripping off the Band-Aid a bit but not doing it too soon that you forget that you’ve ripped a Band-Aid off in the first place. Even still, this is just a personal recommendation that ultimately probably won’t change much at all for you.

Just to help out in case you have no idea what I’m talking about, some people choose to take a “diagnostic” exam right before they start any MCAT studying to see where they stand.

I have pretty extreme views on diagnostics, in that I think they’re kind of useless. My first recommendation is to not use an AAMC exam as your diagnostic, maybe use one of the free exams from a 3rd party company.

A diagnostic should only really be used (again, in my opinion) to identify where you need to start and to get a feel for what it’s like to take the MCAT. Maybe you did better than you thought on B/B but horrible on P/S, so maybe start your studying there. Since the exam is gruelingly long, at least getting an initial exposure to that before fully diving into studying might also help mentally wrapping your head around what it’s like to take the exam.

However, outside of those two reasons, diagnostics don’t do much. Who cares if you get a 472 on your diagnostic, maybe you haven’t been in school for a decade or it’s been a while since you’ve had to work that hard for an exam, etc., you won’t truly know what your score roughly is until after you’ve done some content reviewing and practicing. People are often super shocked when I tell them I “jumped 30-something points” from my diagnostic to my real exam the first time I took it, but in my diagnostic, it had been 4 years since my initial biology courses, I took it on a Friday right after some of my undergraduate finals, and quite honestly, I had no clue what the hell I was doing. You’re going to fell as dumb as a bag of rocks when you start studying for this exam, so if you do decide to take a diagnostic, don’t care about the score at all, just use it as getting your brain’s feet soaked in the water for the mental part of the exam as well as maybe using it as a guide for where to start.

If you can’t get to everything, you’re going to want to prioritize the AAMC materials, since they’re the company that actually will be making your exam. If you can’t even get to every AAMC material, I most highly recommend getting through all of the FLs as well as the Section Banks.

The Section Banks are the most difficult practice the AAMC has given us and will prep you for the harder questions you get on your real MCAT. You’ll still get some easier questions on your MCAT, just maybe not as many as what are stuck into the Section Bank, so it’s great practice because it’s really hard.