The question I get asked most is ‘do I need to know this?’ or ‘will they really test this?’ and I can give the student a well-represented answer, because I have seen many tests, hundreds of passages, and thousands of questions.

I have a good sample size of what the AAMC will test and what they won’t. A question on mole rats metabolism from the Kaplan probably won’t appear again and chances are won’t appear on your test but probably the concept of homeostasis (which is what the mole rate question was trying to test but maybe unsuccessfully) will. A good tutor will distill down questions to their essence and let you know what you really need to know so that it doesn’t feel like you are memorizing a bunch of random facts. In this blog, I want to talk to you about some general practice test strategies (Part 1), then my thoughts on the various practice tests on the market (Part 2) and then my final recommendations (Part 3).

Part I: General practice test strategies 1. I have found that doing your studying in two rounds (or even three) works much better than students studying their brains out for months straight and then diving into the practice tests the last month and then realizing that they were not studying as effectively as they could have in the months before. The reason many students do the latter- that is, study everything as much as they can before taking the practice tests- is a fear of taking the practice test.

I’m just not ready, these students say to me. I don’t want to waste practice questions when I’m not ready. Okay, truth be told, you might never be ‘ready ready’ for the MCAT.

Hence why no one has gotten a perfect score on this exam. I am sure you know of people who have scored perfectly on the SAT, the GRE, the GMAT but I bet you don’t know any who has score nowhere near perfect on the MCAT. This is because a perfect score is impossible. You would have to get almost 0 wrong and to get almost 0 wrong, you would have to know the science very well, and also maybe a bit of trivia. I have seen AAMC verbal questions that go like this: “hypothetically, if the world reached an apocalypse, which of the following professions would you save?” Uh….what? Who wrote this question? Save the doctors I guess since this is a med school exam? Also some questions are just completely subjective. So whenever I hear students tell me that they are not ready to take a practice exam even though I think they are, I tell them to give up this notion of being so ready. You just need to be ready enough and the exams can help you get even more ready. What I recommend is that whatever time you give yourself to study for this test total, start taking practice tests halfway through. So for example, if you have 6 months to study, start taking practice tests at 3 months. If you have 4 months, start testing at 2 months. I do not recommend tackling this test in 1 month. It is just very hard to do and from the handful of people I have seen do this, it has not gone as well as they had envisioned. For the one or two students this has worked well for (and I mean one or two in my 5 years of tutoring this exam), they studied 12+ hours a day, 7 days a week. They had no life for a month and were perpetually stressed, nervous, anxious, and all in all, not fine.

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