The Hardest Part of the MCAT

In my mind, one of the most difficult aspects of the MCAT is that it covers more material than any exam you have ever taken in your life. Think about it, some of the hardest college classes out there are organic chemistry, biochemistry, and physics. Take these classes, plus 6 or 7 more of the rigorous pre-med classes, put them together, and you have the MCAT.

In order to get an A in a typical pre-med class, most students are able to take simple notes, review them once or twice, maybe do a few practice problems, and then do totally fine on the exam. But, if you took those same students and tested them on that material a week after their exam, how many of them would still remember everything? Likely not very many would. You see, it is one thing to be able to learn, memorize, and then regurgitate information, but the MCAT requires much more. It requires you to understand, memorize, and be able to apply every concept from all of your pre-med classes on a single exam!

So, how are you supposed to keep all this information in your head? Well, there is no easy answer to this one, but the key is to have a good system of review. Taking notes and skimming over them will only get you so far when it comes to taking the MCAT. You NEED a better review system than that, which is why I strongly emphasize to my students that they MUST take notes in a format that they can test themselves on. If you can’t test yourself on the notes you create, they are worthless. That’s why I recommend skipping the notebook and pen, and simply making notecards. I did this in all my college classes, and I believe it was the key to getting straight A’s in all my pre-med classes. 

Our FREE eCourse will help you implement a regular system of review that will ensure that every MCAT concept will be fresh on your mind come test day.  Our eCourse is also fully equipped with countless Quizlet notecards built into each lesson. And our Create-your-own Study Plan Course will teach you my most important notecard-making tips. You won’t want to prepare for the MCAT without these key resources. If you need more help, consider signing up for our lowest-price-guaranteed tutoring options!

Warm regards,

Andrew  George

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How we Matched up the Khan Academy Passages with the eCourse Lessons

Each lesson of the eCourse contains links to 1 to 5 Khan Academy science passages for the purpose of providing you with non-AAMC material to practice your science passage reading skills on. By completing all the linked passages within every lesson, you will have finished all the freely available Khan Academy science passages.

To match up the Khan Academy Science Passages with the eCourse lessons, we carefully examined the passage and question content of each one. Then we decided which lesson of the eCourse best correlated with that content. You may notice that some passages don’t match up perfectly with the current lesson. If they don’t match up with the current lesson, they should match up with one of the previous lessons in the module. We did this carefully so that you could practice your science passage reading skills on passages that contain the content you’ve already learned.

Why we don’t recommend non-AAMC CARS practice questions

We recommend practicing CARS by reading non-AAMC CARS passages but not doing the associated practice problems. The reason we don’t recommend doing the practice problems is because the MCAT is written by the AAMC. They have a very unique style in which they write CARS practice questions that third-party companies (try as they might) are unable to replicate. When students spend time on non-AAMC CARS practice problems, they get familiar with the wrong style of questioning, leading them to overthink and incorrectly respond to the questions written by the AAMC. Thus, it is in your best interest to solely practice on AAMC CARS practice questions.

That said, we highly recommend practicing your reading skills on non-AAMC CARS passages. In our Ultimate CARS Strategy Course, we provide you with 1,000 free CARS passages and 100+ homework assignments, giving you ample material to practice on. Reading countless passages while practicing the proper reading habits and strategies will prepare you well to conquer the CARS section as it was written by the AAMC.

Which books do the lessons match up with?

The books we use in each lesson are linked below. We plan to stick with these older editions of the books since very little has changed and the older editions are much more affordable:

First Edition of the Kaplan 7-book Series
First Edition of the Princeton 7-book Series

Do the chapters match up perfectly?

The Kaplan Books, Princeton Books, and Khan Academy Videos were all produced by different authors. For this reason, there are some chapters in the Kaplan Book or Princeton Book that are not even found in the Khan Academy Videos and vice versa. For instance, the Kaplan and Princeton Books have chapters that cover certain experimental procedures that the Khan Academy Videos do not cover.

Our goal in matching up the books with the videos was to correlate the content as best as possible while also covering ALL the content from every resource. For this reason, when nothing in the Kaplan Books matched up with one of the video playlists, instead of leaving the reading assignment for Kaplan blank, we inserted material that did not fit in anywhere else (i.e. one of those chapters on an experimental procedure that was not covered by Khan Academy). So, when the assignment doesn’t appear to match up right, please know that this was intentional.

*If you follow the reading assignments outlined, you will finish the entire Kaplan 7-book series and/or Princeton 7-book series by the time you finish all 10 content modules.

Do the sections match up perfectly?

If the sections assigned in our eCourse do not match up with the sections contained in your content review book, you may have a different edition. The sections should still match up the large majority of the time, but in the rare instance that they don’t, I’d recommend simply reading sections that do match up and saving the ones that do not for a future lesson.

MCAT Launchpad Required!

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