Top 6 Essential Tips to Get High Scores on the MCAT | Pre-med articles | Medical Education center

After the fun and excitement of high school graduation, you start the countdown for the next big chapter of your life. For most people, that is going to an in-state university and being away from home for the first prolonged period of time in your life. You meet with the guidance counselors during Orientation Week and they help you pick a major and try to decide your life’s path; a very useful exercise in the 15 minutes most have set aside for you during this week. A large portion of the new student body has their sights set on becoming doctors and do some version of Pre-Med tracks in order to make that happen. As freshmen transition to sophomores, the numbers drastically diminish as students realize Physics, or Organic Chemistry, or Biochemistry is not their cup of tea and switch majors to something less demanding.

Those who survive the “weed out” classes eventually become Juniors and then they realize that their days of undergraduate studies are numbered and the stress of preparing for Medical School starts to create some anxiety. As the days pass, this anxiety blossoms into a full-fledged panic attack.

Students question their credentials and start to volunteer and find research in as many places as they can in order to make themselves as competitive as possible. Although extracurriculars are a bonus to differentiate between strong candidates, one of the largest differentials that an Admissions Board will consider is your scores on the MCAT Exam.

Medical schools are very subjective on the criteria they are interested in; some prefer publications and research experience, some stress volunteering and humanitarian efforts, but none of that matters if you don’t score well on the MCAT.

You may have just had another shot of epinephrine after reading this and felt that stress all over again. The aim of this article is to not freak you out but to help you systematically prepare for “the biggest exam of your life,” so far. Here are the top 6 essential tips to make sure that you are as relaxed and prepared for as possible on Test Day.

Number 1: Set Aside 6-12 months just for Exam Preparation

This is the single most important thing that you can do for yourself. There is no point in trying to lie to yourself and say “it is just another exam, no need to worry about it.” This may help you calm down for the moment, but it will always cause of tidal wave of panic later on. The point of having adequate time is to paralyze the panic so you are not unnerved in your methodology.

You have to approach studying for the MCAT like it is your job, literally. You should be studying for at least 6-8 hours a day with minimum interruptions to prepare you for the large amount of material that you are expected to know. This is not the Biology mid-term where you can cram the week before an expect to do well.

If you want to be a doctor, this is the first dose of what you will be experiencing for the next 8 years at least. It is your job to know and understand the material so you can use that information to treat patients responsibly and correctly.

You should also try to follow a study routine every day while making this schedule. The MCAT is the longest exam you will take (so far) and it is important to build up endurance for the test. If you schedule the exam for a morning slot, wake up every day as if it were exam day. Have your breakfast, have your coffee, and then get into reviewing material that you covered the previous day. It is no good to start new material right out of the gate because there is so much to get through. If you try to finish Biology as quickly as possible, when you move to Organic Chemistry, you forget all the material you learned in Biology. Our brains can only process so much information at a time so it is important to keep reviewing material to allow the neurons in your brain time to process the information and create memory pathways to help you recall the facts faster.

You should review previous material for at least an hour and then spend the next 3 learning new material until lunch break.

Take an hour off just to give you some reprieve from the computer screen or textbook print but then it is important to get right back into the notes after an hour. Even if you are tired and tell yourself “I’ll make up the time tomorrow,” believe me, you will not have the endurance you need to survive this test. You have to train your mind to respond to small intervals of breaks and work even when you’re tired. If this sounds miserable, just wait until residency.

Number 2: Buy an MCAT Review Series

This is not the time to save money. You spent the last 3 years buying cheap food, cheap beer, and doing whatever it takes to stretch that scholarship money or financial aid as long as possible. You can memorize all the structures of the amino acids in your textbook, you can remember all the physics formulas you’ve ever used, but the MCAT is not a test designed to test your fact recall.

It is written by test writers already assuming that you know it and have mastered all those basic components in undergraduate studies and instead, it is testing your ability to apply it to medical concepts.

Resistance and Parallel Circuits covered into Physics can easily transform into blood flow throughout vasculature so the key thing is to be familiar with it so you can use it in a more practical setting. Although these MCAT Prep Courses can be expensive, consider it an investment in your future and it is much easier to depreciate it in your mind after that. Material from ExamKrackers 101 and Kaplan Review were two resources that I used during my preparation and I believe they are some of the best materials out on the market. They cover only the high-yield topics that are on the MCAT and breakdown practice questions and concepts to basic levels in order for you to master it. The one nice thing that you start to notice during all this preparation for not only MCAT, but also USMLE STEP exams if the MCAT goes well, is that the test writers love to repeat specific styles of questions so instead of learning 300 different concepts to cover all the questions you may face, it is much easier to learn how to solve the 5-10 different styles of questions you will experience so it is more manageable for you to process. If you use these study aids, you will repeat the same styles of questions over and over again so by the time you get around to finally starting to use practice questions, it is second-nature for you.

Two More Essential Tips to Master the MCAT

Number 3: Do MCAT Practice Questions

This may seem like an obvious one but just to spell it out for you, if you do not do practice questions, you will have a lower MCAT average score.

There are several different sites that offer practice questions like ExamKrakers, Kaplan, and Khan Academy to name a few and all of them do a good job interpreting what you are going to expect on Test Day.

What is beneficial about these testing guides is they often have a comprehensive overview explaining why the correct answer was chosen while explaining incorrect material as well. This helps to reinforce the material that you have already studied and clarify some of the finer points that may not be as evident on reviewing the text. Often times, exam writers will target the exceptions to the rules and it is important to not overlook those details while studying.

READ Rebounding From Medical School Rejection

Another benefit of doing practice questions is you have an early glimpse of what style to expect when writing your test. The most important thing to remember on Test Day is you will not know all of the information!!!

If you are the type of person that needs to know everything to feel comfortable before writing a test, you need to adjust your approach to the core. Test writers purposefully write about material that you while never have heard of before because they want to test how you respond to stress.

It could be concepts in Organic Chemistry you have never heard of or diseases that may have appeared once in a textbook during Medical School. This may seem strange but in reality, you are presented with a lot of scenarios on a daily basis in the hospital where you have to think on your feet and solve riddles that you have never heard of before. These questions are just earlier teasers of what real medicine is going to be like. If you don't do practice questions, this may unnerve you during the actual test and diminish your performance.

Number 4: Study Material with a Partner

This is a great way to help study for the MCAT and is a useful therapeutic tool to have during your endeavor. You may think that studying with someone else could lead to falling into conversations and interrupting your study flow. If that does happen, switch partners but do not try to do this alone.

A study partner can help push you to study the material more precisely and you can use each other as motivation. The MCAT is not a sprint, it is a marathon.

You are going to get frustrated along the way, question if it is worth all the effort and stress you are putting yourself through, and do practice tests where you score less than 50% correctly. That is all part of the process. It is paramount to have someone on your side going through the same thing in order to make sure you stay focused and push you through the adversity.

If you are the type of person that views everyone else as competition and trying to get into the same schools as you are, you are going to have a very rough path in this career. Yes, there is a chance that you and your friend may interview at the same schools but if you choose to prepare alone for this test, you will surrender another valuable tool that you must utilize to be a good doctor. You have to accept that you don't know everything. Someone may be better than you in one field and the most important thing to survive in this field is to be humble enough to ask for help. This can even apply to studying where you may specialize in Biology but be horrendous in Physics. If your friend is better in that field, he can teach you material to help you learn the concept and vice versa pushing you both into higher MCAT percentiles and more interviews.

A Time for Reflection: MCAT Study Guides

Number 5: Do Practice Exams

This is a very different point compared to just practice questions. When you are working through a set of practice questions, there is no pressure and if you make a mistake, you can read about why you were wrong and keep going. Practice exams are a whole different beast entirely. This is the only way to get a real experience of what an actual exam will be like when you sit in for it on Test Day without having it count. I would recommend that you do at least 8 different practice examinations during your preparation in order to prepare for this exam.

They may be costly but the more practice you have, the more competitive your scores are going to be for the Medical School Admissions Board.

The MCAT prep courses are beneficial for several different reasons. When you write a test, you experience the sensation of having a timer counting down each section. If you don't think that is going to be an issue, try it once and let me know how it goes. This is something that is impossible to prepare for unless you do the actual tests. This added stress takes it toll on your brain and it may have a hard time recalling even the most simple of facts when under pressure. "What was I thinking?" will be a common phrase you utter after just a few of these tests. It is important to adjust yourself to this timed questions in order to make sure you are as calm as possible for when it counts.

Another key point to consider is that after the end of each test, you will have a comprehensive breakdown of your strengths and weaknesses on the test. These statistics are worth their weight in gold. You must analyze what you do well and poorly and do whatever you need to do to make sure you master your weaknesses. You only get one shot so you want to make sure that you do everything in your power to make sure to put yourself in the best position possible.

Number 6: Don't be scared to push your exam back!

This is a big test, the consequences are huge. The best thing you can do for yourself is be honest and decide if you are truly ready once Test Day approaches. If you were scoring poorly on practice tests, having a hard time mastering some subcategories, or just feel overly anxious about the whole thing, pay the penalty fee and change your test date.

Although you are able to take the MCAT multiple times, in reality, Admissions Boards will only consider your first attempt. If you score much higher on the second attempt, even a sensational score can bruise your application and potentially take you out of consideration instantly.

Only you will truly know if you are ready. Realize that after the examination, everyone feels like they failed. No matter how well you prepared and how many times you rehearsed with practice questions, you feel like garbage after that test, guaranteed. It is important to just be confident in the process and if you scoring in the 90th-percentile on practice tests, you should be in the neighborhood once you actually get your results. If you aren't scoring in that quartile before the test, there is a very low chance you will have a miracle and score dozens of points higher than you normally average. The MCAT is not a Microeconomics Final, your score will reflect the amount of effort you put in during preparation so if you aren't scoring well before it, push it back a long as it takes until you have a satisfactory result. If this means taking a year off just to study after graduation, that may be what it takes as well.

Your MCAT score is a magical key that can either open a lot of doors for you or close a lot of them so you want to make sure that you forge it as best you can.

Couldn't find what you looking for?

TRY OUR SEARCH!