A Comprehensive Review of ExamKrackers 101 for MCAT Prep

If you have been researching about MCAT Prep Courses on SteadyHealth already, you may have come across some of my other articles discussing the common platforms of Kaplan and the Princeton Review as two of the benchmarks that students are using in order to prepare for their MCAT Exam. Of the 85% of students that enroll in supplemental courses for MCAT Prep, the vast majority flock to these institutions to prepare.  Nevertheless, as you may have read already, both Kaplan and the Princeton Review have some flaws that are not fully covered during their presentations so students seek alternative material to patch the missing gaps.  

Enter ExamKrackers 101.  This resource is the final piece of material that you will likely need in order to give yourself the best possible chance to succeed on Test Day.  I will present you some of the positive and negative aspects about using this book and then do my best to convince you that an additional expense can be validated in this situation.  

The Positive Aspects About ExamKrackers 101 Series

ExamKrackers provides a dual platform depending on what your needs are going into the exam.  For those of you who value personal study time and complete flexibility, you can enroll in an ExamKracker Online MCAT Prep Course and be able to access live streams of material covered by an instructor.  This option covers 115 hours of a live-streamed review but each lesson is broken down into more manageable 50 minute blocks with a review session to close out the class.  This class meets 6 days a week for a 9-week period and after completing lessons on Mondays and Wednesday, the next lessons will be completing practice Exams followed by an in-depth review of the process to learn how this was solved.  This was something unique to ExamKrackers and you will not find this with Kaplan or the Princeton Review.  

If you prefer to have a more rigorous live session, that is also possible with the ExamKrackers and you will be able to enroll in a live class.  This is set-up exactly like the online program expect you will be in the audience and able to interact easier with the tutors rather than writing in questions.  This may be a better option if you find that you may get distracted on Facebook or other social media apps during a lesson. Studying for the MCAT is boring, monotonous, and you will try to distract yourself at some point during the months of preparation.  It may be a good idea to force yourself to be attentive so a Live-Class may work.  Both courses cost a steep $2,299 but that is pretty similar to the other programs out there. 

I did not use ExamKrackers for their online class but did do what a lot of my colleagues found to be helpful. You are able to buy the textbooks from ExamKrackers directly and can use this as a valuable supplement to make the material more digestible and most of all get high scores on the MCAT.  You are able to buy the complete set or just individual books for each section.  What I found most helpful was purchasing the MCAT Verbal Reasoning literature.  This is a very good tool to help you learn how to approach the Verbal Reasoning questions you will run into on Test Day.  It is very similar to the style you will actually see on the Test and gives you useful tools to help you reason through a tough set of questions.  

Why You May Need to Think Twice Before You Buy ExamKrackers 

The Negatives About ExamKrackers 

Although ExamKrackers is heralded as the most realistic mock Exam preparation on the market, one fatal flaw is that the questions are generally easier than what you will face on the MCAT. This can be a very dangerous truth because as you study the material, higher and higher scores can give you a false sense of security and may coast through the last few weeks of studying.  I would recommend using these resources early on in your studies to familiarize yourself with the format of the section but you do not want to come into the exam overly confident that you are about to score very highly.  This MCAT exam is no joke and you will struggle during a few of the passages to get high scores on the MCAT.  

Another negative is the lack of topics specific for humanities and philosophy in this resource.  The MCAT will give at least one passage in each during the exam so if you do not have any prior experience dealing with these questions, that could significantly impact your scores.  Kaplan does put up a respectable attempt at covering these sub-categories during my In-Class area so it may be wise to look elsewhere to get tutelage.  Granted, these are not the most complicated topics on the exam but you will soon find that under ideal conditions, most people would be able to score highly on the MCAT if given enough time to logically think through the questions.  Time and stress is your biggest enemy on MCAT exam and you will make foolish errors that you will not have time to double-check in most cases.  

The last negative that was brought up by my colleagues was the fact that ExamKrackers contains a lot of typos and questionable responses that can make studying annoying.  This may sound nit-picky but if you are reading through 8 hours of material everyday, you will start to notice something minor like a typo and if you review enough material, you have a chance to encounter dozens of errors.  If you then decide to take some practice tests and find that a logical answer choice is incorrect, that may leave you frustrated with the resource and you discard it.  

My Recommendation 

In my opinion, I think it is a wise choice to start using ExamKrackers as a supplemental resource for your MCAT preparation.  It does fill in some of the gaps left behind when using either Kaplan or the Princeton Review and could inflate your final MCAT score by a few points, but if you only work with ExamKrackers probably your MCAT score will lower than expected. Considering it is much more agreeable than another $2,000 course, buying a few review books would present some valuable insight into how to approach a problem better.  Even if the questions may be a little easier to work through compared to the actually MCAT, familiarizing yourself with the style of the questions on Test Day can at least help you keep your nerve so you are able to focus on the questions and give your best effort.  As you can see from this article as well as other similar ones covering Kaplan MCAT review and the Princeton Review, there is no perfect study aid out there and some students will find that one resource is superior than another one.  As you progress higher in Medicine, you realize that the choices become no less scarce so as long as you learn the material from one resource and can apply that to a test or to a patient (if you are in Residency), then that is all that matters.  Patients do not care what textbook you used in order to learn how to competently treat them so just find something that works for you and switch if it stops helping you learn all this hard material.