<p>To study for the MCAT, I bought the ExamKrackers Complete Study Package (just the five books for content review) and I also got the EK 101 Verbal Passages and EK 1001 Biology Questions. </p>
<p>From what I've heard, the verbal and the biology "1001" books are the only ones that follow the "format" of the MCAT in the sense that they are passage based, whereas the 1001 books for physics, chemistry, and organic are essentially a bunch of "discretes". </p>
<p>To those of you who have used Examkrackers, or are familiar with these books, would you recommend buying the additional 1001 books for physics, chemistry, and organic? I feel as though as long as I know the actual content well, I'd have no problem answering the "discrete" questions on full length exams. However, it would feel weird that I'm essentially not doing any practice for physics, chemistry, and organic other than reviewing content.</p>
<p>The only book of questions/passages I have it the 101 VR. Not sure if it’s helping or not…seeing as my scores aren’t changing >.></p>
<p>I’ve never seen the bio/physics/chem ones. But if it’s true that those aren’t passage based, then I’d definitely advise not to get them. The stand-alone questions feel COMPLETELY different from passage-based ones and are a rather small part of the actual MCAT.</p>
<p>I took AAMC #3 just to sort of determine a baseline for my scoring and I wound up with a 28 (8 PS, 10V, 10 BS). </p>
<p>I feel pretty good about that, especially considering I haven’t looked at general chemistry in like 2 years and I haven’t done the second semester of physics yet either.</p>
Around the time DS was studying for MCAT, I learned from SDN that the verbal and the bio ones from ExamKrackers are good. However, when I tried to get him on any of these, he decided not to spend his precious time on any of these and chose to rely on Kaplan’s material exclusively. He did take a quick look at a verbal one from ExamKrackers, and very quickly believed it is not as real as the (later) AAMC ones. He’s doing fine in the end.</p>
<p>Hmmm…I heard that, unlike the “later” AAMC tests, some “early” AAMC may not be very similar to the real MCAT test. On the other hand, you do not want to “waste” the precious “later” AAMC tests too soon in your preparation for MCAT.</p>
<p>Not to harsh on your good feeling, patsrule, but AAMC #3 is reputed to unusually easy and not at all representative of how you’ll score on the real thing. The later AAMC exams are much closer to the look and feel of the real thing.</p>
<p>From what I’ve heard, only the latest AAMC tests are close to the actual MCAT. Obviously, I don’t want to take one of these in the beginning, but rather, I’d save them for the end near the end of my studying. </p>
<p>I merely took it as a sort of diagnostic tool to see approximately where I stood. It did seem somewhat easier than I expected, but I think the scoring scale accounts for this too - just comparing the raw score conversion to the actual score, I needed to get a higher raw score on AAMC #3 to get the same score.</p>
<p>Regardless, I’m still going to study extra hard, so I’m not really concerned with my score.</p>
<p>^ Any one who is capable of scoring a 15 on the most challenging section, the VR, should be able to do well on MCAT, as the tests on the other two sections are more “teachable” within a relatively short time period, as I heard.</p>
<p>I think the EK1001 books are underrated study materials.</p>
<p>I spent the week before my MCAT doing EK1001 Physics practice problems, and after taking the MCAT I can say I wish I had spent more time with the whole EK1001 series. While content review is good and the EK1001 format is more discrete in format, that sort of raw practice is very worthwhile plus for the PS section the multi-part questions are really series of discretes. Also the value of being able to answer things like Biology discretes or more theoretical physical discretes quickly and certainly is underestimated. I missed a few biology discretes which I am certain translated to 1 or 2 points on that section. In retrospect, for me EK1001 would have been a much better use of time than the Berkeley Review material that I wasted so much time with instead.</p>
<p>I do agree that the 101 verbal is the best verbal workbook, but it is not without its flaws. Their method did not work for me personally, and I did better using my own method where I reviewed each verbal passage, ranked them according to difficulty/type, knocked out the easy ones quickly, then attacked the medium difficulty, and finally “flowed” the hardest passage or two CX style before answering the questions. Verbal is the trickiest subject to do consistently well in, and studying for it can be very frustrating. If you can average 12 across all of the practice tests especially with some improvement, then don’t sweat it.</p>