There are hundreds, upon hundreds of P/S terms you’re going to want to know for the MCAT, so you probably will want to start studying the terms sooner rather than later so you’re not trying to memorize 1800 terms in four days. Space it out, take your time, we’re going for understanding and recognition!

When you’re going through flashcards, try to come up with an example of each term or phrase that is being tested. The MCAT will pretty much either give you a term and ask for an example or give you an example and ask for a term, so coming up with (or having) an example of each term will making that process easier to translate from memorizing terms to practicing questions.

I have a deck coming out sometime either in late March or early April that tries to enforce this idea, so stay tuned!

I had many students that I’d ask them, for example, what Linguistic Relativism is, and they could spit out the definition on the back of their card, but when I asked them to put it into their own words or ask a question about it, they couldn’t. If you can put the cards into your own words, that’s a demonstration that you understand the info enough to be able to answer questions about it.

Don’t memorize text, understand that text and come up with your own understanding of the term so it’s easier for you to recognize it in the wild.

Obviously, there are many language theories that are similar, many identity development theories that are similar, etc., and it’s important to be able to identify the differences between those, but I’m also saying to be able to decipher the differences between words like prejudice and discrimination, for example. Very similar connotation, but the former is a cognition/attitude, the latter is a behavior.

It’s important to be able to distinguish those similar terms from each other, because the MCAT will throw them all at you at once and require you to pick between them!

The P/S section, like the B/B section, will require you to analyze the results of a lot of experiments, and ask, “which of the following is a valid conclusion based on yada yada yada?”. If the passage only provided a correlation, that’s simply just a cool relationship between two things. If there is a causation, that means we have directly proved that one thing caused another. Just make sure you don’t mix up the two on questions like these!