Mastering Content with Self-Testing

If you ask any friend who scored exceptionally high on the MCAT for studying advice, they are likely to tell you two things: take lots of practice tests and master the content through self-testing. We’ve already covered how to take practice tests in other blog posts, so for now let’s focus on self-testing. 

Self-Testing for the MCAT

Self-testing can involve many layers, from practice problems to mental outlines, but the basic principle is creating scenarios for yourself where you are forced to recall information about the material you studied. The beauty of self-testing is that it doesn’t even matter how accurately you can recall information; the physical act of recall is what strengthens the connections in your brain on a cellular level (this process is called long term potentiation for all the nerds out there). Educational researchers have spent decades trying to understand how we all learn best and this form of self-testing wins out every time. When active recall is paired with spaced-repetition, this strengthens these mental connections more and more. This is the philosophy guiding every step of our FREE Ecourse.

To take advantage of self-testing, we recommend working through the Khan Academy videos, prep books, or both and making flashcards for the concepts and definitions that you don’t already understand completely. Then, at the end of your studies for the day, you can review those cards to solidify the content that you learned.  

For most of us, flashcards are the simplest method of self-testing. You may remember making physical flashcards to learn a language or study for an exam in high school. However, with technology at our disposal, making flashcards has never been easier or more organized. You can even find new, creative ways to make flashcards on your own. Or you can buy a stack of notecards and follow in Andrew’s footsteps by making thousands of physical flashcards. However, if you are looking for tried and true methods that have enabled hundreds of the top scorers in the past, look no further than Quizlet and Anki.

Quizlet 

Quizlet is probably the flashcard software that most of you are familiar with. The user interface is intuitive and incredibly user-friendly. We’ve created THOUSANDS of high-quality cards for the MCAT that you can use if you don’t have the time or patience to make your own. However, Quizlet recently removed their spaced-repetition software and so there is no great way to only review the cards that you need to revisit. Using our model for spaced repetition in the FREE MCAT Ecourse, we will walk you through the best ways to maximize these Quizlet cards using spaced repetition. Our decks also use the premium Quizlet software, so you would otherwise have to pay just as much if not more to make the same quality of cards for yourself.

Anki

If you haven’t heard of Anki by now, you probably haven’t talked to anyone in medical school. Anki, with spaced-repetition self-testing, has truly revolutionized medical education as we know it. Anki allows medical students, and MCAT test-takers, to store massive amounts of information in long-term memory. Think of Anki as a bare-bones version of Quizlet, except with an algorithm that dictates when you see new cards. 

MCAT Self Prep Free ECourse

After you reveal the answer to a given flashcard, you tell the algorithm whether that card was easy, medium, or hard for you. If it was hard, you may see that card the next day. If it was easy, you may see it in 5 days.

MCAT Self Prep Free eCourse

Gradually, the intervals lengthen and so if you choose medium repeatedly for a card you would see it after 2, 4, 8, 12, and then 20 days for example. 

Anki also allows you to create cards using screenshots on your computer. You can choose which area of the image you want to cover and then the “back of the flashcard answer” will reveal that area. Again, you can choose whether it was easy, medium, or hard to recall that visual answer. 

MCAT Self Prep Free eCourse

The only downside to Anki is that there is a significant start-up cost associated with learning how to use the application. It’s free for all computers and for the Android app, which is nice, but if you want to download Anki to an iPhone that will also cost you $25. To learn to use Anki, I would recommend watching some great Youtube tutorials because Anki is hard to figure out at first. These video tutorial channels helped me a lot. Definitely figure out how to get and use the image occlusion addon and close deletions for your card types and maybe a few others. Here is the list the addons that I ended up using. 

Whether you end up using Quizlet or Anki, there are options to use pre-made decks. If you are short on time, pre-made Anki decks can help save time. But if you plan on dedicating at least a few months to MCAT studying, please… MAKE YOUR OWN CARDS. This will force you to actively engage in the learning process and your increased score will reflect that. If you don’t have the time, you can easily get access to our higher quality cards as part of the Advanced Pro Plan and use the Quizlet importer add-on to convert these Quizlet cards to your own Anki decks.

Practice Questions

Our free ecourse includes 360 AAMC-styled discrete questions, which are built into quizzes within each lesson, and 2,500+ practice questions available with our Advanced Pro and Deluxe Pro plans. One of the best ways to test your ability to answer MCAT style questions is to take these quizzes as you learn the material taught in each lesson of our e-course.

My name is Theo and I am one of the Head tutors for MCAT Self Prep who scored a perfect 528 on test day. Please reach out to me with any questions about tutoring or Anki/Quizlet using the link at the bottom of my tutoring profile.

Warm regards,

Theo Bennett

 

Theo Bennett scored a perfect score (528) on the MCAT and has been accepted at Harvard, UPenn, Columbia, UCLA, and other top 10 medical schools across the country. You can learn more and sign up to work with him one-on-one here.

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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!

Before jumping into our free eCourse, you’ll need to complete orientation by watching MCAT Launchpad. During this free 35-minute intro session with Head Tutor Andrew, you’ll learn 6 Keys to Earning a Top MCAT Score, the 5 Essential Elements of an Effective Study Plan, 12 Tips for Taking the Best MCAT Study Notes, and more! Andrew will also provide you with a detailed overview of the Free MCAT Prep Course, teaching you how to get started.

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