You just need to be ready enough and the exams can help you get even more ready. 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. 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.

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. This is because a perfect score is impossible. 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. Hence why no one has gotten a perfect score on this exam. Okay, truth be told, you might never be ‘ready ready’ for the MCAT. I don’t want to waste practice questions when I’m not ready. I’m just not ready, these students say to me. 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 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. Part I: General practice test strategies 1. 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). 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. 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. I have a good sample size of what the AAMC will test and what they won’t.

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. Here is where a tutor can really make a difference. And truthfully, adding points, taking away points, these all add to the noise of your already hyper-stressed mental state. I have heard a lot of different stories about how many points to add to your score for an EK test to match the real thing, or how many points to take off of a Gold Standard score, or what questions to ignore. What I try to tell my students is that you are using practice tests, especially those by other test companies, is don’t sweat your score too much. And I can say that after 40+ tests, they all start to blend together. Whatever I recommend to the students, I have taken them myself. Having tutored both for the old and new MCAT, I have taken my fair share of tests. But what has not varied from student to student is taking practice tests. Some students need more structure, a day-to-day agenda. These students then ask me what is the best way to study and my answer to that really varies student by student. I think I have said this to every one of my students.

Amcas mcat practice test