<p>Well, it's official. I'm registered for both the 2-month Kaplan course and the MCAT exam at the end of this summer.</p>
<p>Being nervous is such an understatement, because test day is less than 4 months away, and I won't be able to start studying until mid-May at the earliest.</p>
<p>Is 2.5 months enough time to study thoroughly for the MCAT? I'll be doing low-key volunteering and RA-ing at a summer college program.</p>
<p>Thanks all!</p>
<p>Yeah, it's plenty. I actually maxed out around six weeks and saw my score drop from there.</p>
<p>BDM how much did you study during those 6 weeks (Hours/day)?</p>
<p>Six hours a week in class, eight hours a week in practice tests, and... goodness, it's been a long time. Hard to remember how much else, but definitely less than ten a week besides that. I was also holding down a research project and going on a service project that summer.</p>
<p>Probably about twenty hours a week. And remember, I had to learn Physics from Kaplan.</p>
<p>D has signed up for 8/7 MCAT . She will start in earnest a week or so after finals. So she's on the same schedule. She has decided to do either Kaplan online or just buy the materials from a friend. From her research at her school , many kids feel that the lectures on subject matter will be ...less than useful for her. But she's still on the fence. The classroom doesn't meet her schedule. </p>
<p>But, if she doesn't feel good about it, she'll cancel. That's one good thing about taking it the summer between sophomore and junior year.</p>
<p>I saw the physics part and it seemed like a breeze. Except everything else looked ridiculous</p>
<p>1) 10 weeks is plenty of time.</p>
<p>2) BDM is a great guy, but having been a Kaplan instructor AND knowing what I know about him, he is NOT the most representative Kaplan student. I would not necessarily use him as your marker.</p>
<p>3) I laugh when I hear people say "the class is pretty useless". These people are stuck in the mode of thinking that the MCAT is a test of how well you understand science. While being in this paradigm will likely get you through the exam, it's not advisable if you're trying to max out your potential and really score as high as you can. The issue that I ran into most often with students, and why they believe the class is not as effective as they hoped lies in the fact that science is pretty basic and entirely review (unless you're like BDM and have a glaring deficiency) and that there's a lot of emphasis on test taking strategies. </p>
<p>The strategies (and the amount of time spent on them) usually draw the ire of the students because they're not used to using them. As I often told students, they're decent test takers already (for the most part, there are always those kids who score well in their classes because they know every last detail of the material, it's more efficient to have good test taking skills though), because they'd already made it through all these difficult pre-med classes. They have a reservoir of skills and tricks they've learned over the years, and to try to enhance those techniques with new ideas in such a short period of time is scary, especially when you're half way through your preparation and your score is going down, and you can't finish on time because you're trying to follow the strategies. Students in this situation typically abandon the strategies at that point, return to their old habits and lose out on points they could have had.</p>
<p>I typically related the MCAT course to learning a new sport, and the Kaplan instructors were more like coaches than teachers or professors. I think a good example is running - specifically sprinting. Everyone has their natural form, which can do the job of covering a given length of track in a fairly short amount of time. Now if you ran sprints everyday, you'd get faster - you'd become stronger, you'd develop greater stamina, maybe even better reaction to the starter's gun - all things that would help improve your time. These things are equivalent to spending a lot of time on the science on the MCAT. </p>
<p>HOWEVER, a good sprint coach can change the mechanics you have (and those of everyone else) and make you (and them) much faster than you were. A great sprint coach can take people who are naturally REALLY fast and make them faster, just the same as he could take a slow person and make them faster. The thing is, he can also take those people who have been running 1000's of sprints and have gotten as strong as they can, and despite months (or in the case of our HS seniors who always come on here asking for MCAT review book advice - years) of practice aren't seeing progress. And the gains in speed that come from proper form are much greater than those that can be had just by running a lot. That's where the strategies that Kaplan gives you come in, by altering the way you attack passages and questions to make you as efficient as possible. And just like anyone who's ever had a coach adjust their stride, at first it feels awkward and uncomfortable, and so it's easy to say "i'm just going back to the old ways" or "I'm doing okay as it is, and if I just practice enough, doing it the way I've always done it, I'll find some improvement". </p>
<p>When it comes down to it, the two biggest things that mattered for maximum score increase on the MCAT in my experience were: willingness to practice and use the techniques, and confidence/attitude going into test day.</p>