Folder: Planning The MCAT

 The folder contains the following documents:

• File: Schedule.xls

  • My personal schedule, based on a little over 3 months of full time study, using KA as a primary resource. Here’s a summary:

  • ~2 months of content review, all Khan Academy (KA) following with Reddit-compiled notes and adding a bunch of my own notes. During this time I did daily CARS practice, and learned 4 amino acids per week (structure, abbreviation, & polarity)

    • Note: I didn’t review any B/B materials during my initial content review because I have a strong bio background. The only B/B content review I did was during the final month of my studies, where I interlaced it with practice tests, just filling in knowledge gaps where necessary.

  • Next, ~1 month of practice tests, usually in a 3-day cycle of 1 day of testing followed by 2 days of review

• File: MCAT Condensed Topics List.docx

  • A digestible version of the MCAT topics list

• File: Eerror Log Example.xls

  • It’s useful to have an error log so that you can review your mistakes and see where you are making your errors and what you need to improve on most (timing? skim reading? second-guessing?). I’ve included a snippet of my error log so you can see the kind of reviewing I did. Feel free to delete the contents and use the error log as a template for your own error log

• File: Score Predictor.xls

  • Plug in your scores from the AAMC practice materials and see where you stand

• File: Activity Log.xls

  • A day-by-day breakdown of exactly what I did that day, with a commentary of how I felt about each test/resource/day etc.

Links to webpages with useful information for planning the MCAT:

• Webpage: Khan Academy MCAT Videos

  • My primary source of information. I used the Reddit-compiled Khan Academy notes, adding clarifications where necessary, and transcribing/making sweet notes as I went, allowing me to complete the Khan Academy video transcription project!

• Webpage: AAMC Complete Topics List for MCAT

  • AAMC’s exhaustive list of all topics covered on the MCAT.

• Webpage: Percentile Rank <--> MCAT Score relationship

  • Self-explanatory.

Folder: MCAT notes based off of the Khan Academy videos

• This folder contains the notes that allow you to follow along with the MCAT video playlists on Khan Academy (KA). The notes were made by a team effort of various Reddit users and myself.

Folder: Reference Sheets

• This folder contains 100 ‘reference sheets’ or ‘cheat sheets’ that I mostly made from scratch. They are a focused breakdown of specific topics or formulas that are mid-to-high-yield on the MCAT. There are about 30 reference sheets each for B/B, C/P, and P/S sections, so check out the whole folder. I spent my last study day just going through almost all 100 and making sure I knew them inside and out. Below are direct links to a few of the sheets you’ll use most often, but be sure to check out the whole folder.

• File: Annotated Amino Acid Chart 

  • You should know the amino acids inside and out, including their structures, polar properties, which are glucogenic, how to calculate net charge, etc.

• File: Chemistry – Formulas   |   Physics – Formulas 1  |   Physics – Formulas 2

  • These are the ones that I personally had memorized and knew how to use. I’m not sure if any are missing, so please don’t treat these as ‘the only ones you need to know’. You’ll also encounter other formulas during your studies, and you should be familiar with how to use them.

• File: Math on the MCAT

  • A helpful sheet of formulas, tricks for mental math, etc. that I threw together.

• File: Units on the MCAT

  • Here’s a little guide I made to help me remember how to convert between units etc.

These strategies helped me a lot, and might help you too. Try them, and if they don’t work for you then don’t use them – different things work for different people!

(1) Highlight all names and numbers as you go through

• I found this to be really helpful because it gives you an anchor to quickly go back to and find names and dates/time periods (especially if it’s some random painter or philospher that you’ve never heard of).

(2) Write out the following timing guide on your scrap paper in the break before the CARS section:

60 minutes remaining: 3 passages done

30 minutes remaining: 6 passages done

0 minutes remaining: all 9 passages done

• Until about a week before my exam, I was going with ’10 minutes per passage’, and I was getting so freaked out if I was already like 2 minutes behind on the first passage. Then, getting freaked out, I would rush the rest and do poorly. With the timing schedule I’ve suggested above, it takes into consideration that the first couple of passages may be hard/unfamiliar, but that later passages may be easier/more familiar, so the timing will even out. If you get to 60 minutes remaining and you’re a couple minutes behind, don’t panic, but think “hey I need to speed up just a little”. Same at 30 minutes. Use these points as a gauge of your pace.

(3) Practice a bunch, review your mistakes, and have a good and realistic mindset

• I know it’s been said before, but having a good mindset is critical! Instead of thinking ‘I would have got that on exam day!’, think ‘How can I change my approach to make sure that I don’t make the same mistake in the future? How can I learn from this?’.

• For practice, I started with the KA passages (great resource), then moved to EK 101 passages (often hard and sometimes dodgy reasoning, but still helpful in my opinion), and finished with all the AAMC CARS material (most representative, but note that CARS Q PACK 1 is super difficult – seriously, don’t lose sleep over it)

(4) Read the passage out loud (whispering or wording with your mouth)

• I found this helped me stay focused and prevented my mind from drifting.

(5) Do your best not to be intimidated or thrown off by hard passages

• Everyone is experiencing the same thing; just grind through, do your best, and don’t let it mess up your performance on later passages! Those later passages are the passages that you’re going to make your points back on!

(6) Make an “error log” and categorize your mistakes

• By categorizing your mistakes into broad categories (e.g. “Missed a detail in the passage” or “Missed the key theme of the passage”), you can go back and review your Error Log every few days and see what common mistakes you’re making. If the majority of your mistakes are coming from one category, e.g. the “missed detail” category, then you know that the best way to improve from here is to refine my technique by slowing down a little on the passages and paying more attention to detail. It can be hard to pick up on trends when you look at your mistakes per passage, but by reviewing a handful of mistakes from a larger number of passages you’ll be able to pick out key and common mistakes you’re making so that you can actively fix them. 

Turn your phone off and hide it while you’re studying

• This is the big one. I see people who think they have good study habits but are checking social media, texts, and Reddit every 10 minutes. What you need to do is study for 1-2 hours, DISTRACTION FREE. Don’t check your phone, Facebook, Instagram, or ANYTHING during this time. Then, once you’ve got a solid chunk of distraction-free studying in, take a 15 minute break, and do all the texting etc. that you want. Please do not have the mindset of saying “oh I’ll just take 15s to reply to this text” or “I’ll just scroll through /r/MCAT for a few minutes, that’s kinda like studying”. Human attention doesn’t work like this – doing this takes away SO much more from your attention than you think by the time you’ve unfocused and then finally refocused etc.

Study at the library or study spaces at your school, not at home

• Home has way too many distractions – even if you’re the kind of person that thinks they study well at home, the quality of studying you get done in a quiet space away from home is SO MUCH HIGHER.