Should I Time Myself While Doing MCAT Practice Problems?

How often should I be doing practice problems? 

Our analysis of top MCAT scorers has revealed that those who succeed on the MCAT make doing practice problems the central aspect of their study plan. For this reason, you should start doing practice problems from the beginning of your studies by following along with the FREE Ecourse. After finishing each of the 10 content modules, two lessons of practice problems will integrate the AAMC material seamlessly. Doing so will give you an understanding of your strengths and weaknesses, allowing you to craft your study time around improving where it matters most.

Should I time myself when doing practice problems? 

Some top scorers highly recommend timing yourself while doing practice problems while some do not. This is largely dependent on you as a test taker. Are you the kind of student that always needs more time to finish a test? If so, you may want to start timing your practice sessions from day one. If not, you may want to wait to start timing yourself until the final month of your MCAT preparation. When timing yourself, give yourself about one-and-a-half minutes per question.

However, for most students (even if you struggle with timing) it is better to establish good habits and then apply them faster and faster over time. For this reason, start by working through questions methodically and then gradually increasing the speed at which you work. If you’re really frustrated, understand that your pace will naturally increase once you have reviewed the content. Understanding content makes a BIG difference.

On the day of the test, you will be given 90 minutes to complete 53 questions for the CARS section and 95 minutes to complete 59 questions for the other three science sections (this is changed if you are taking the COVID-length MCAT). On test-day, a timer will be counting down in the upper right-hand corner to show you how much time you have remaining. This can be both a blessing and a curse. For some of us, it aids in adjusting our test-taking speed in real-time. But for most of us, the timer just adds unnecessary stress. Stress can even slow us down by paralyzing some students in fear! Therefore, it becomes critical to use the timer as a valuable resource, without it becoming a distraction. 

A good sweet spot is to look at the timer at three critical points during the test and forget it for the rest. For the science sections, optimal pacing can be broken down to completing 20 questions every 30 minutes. This can be translated to test day by glancing at the clock after you have completed 20, 40, and 59 questions. After 20 questions, you should see that you have 1 hour and 5 minutes left. After 40 you should see 35 minutes left. For CARS, there are 9 passages and so you should complete 3 passages every 30 minutes. If you have more or less time at these waypoints, this will dictate your pacing for the rest of the section. 

How can I get more help with practice problems? 

Sometimes it can be hard to figure out why you answered a practice problem wrong. You may want to start by working on the specific areas that you struggle with. You may feel like two answer choices are equally correct. This is why it helps to study with someone who has already done well on the MCAT. Our Elite tutors can walk you through even the most difficult practice problems. They will help you understand why the correct answers are correct and why the incorrect options are incorrect. They will also give you the guidance needed to solve a similar problem in the future. Schedule your first session today to get started!

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.

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