<p>How can I prep to do well on the MCAT? Any recs for books and things I should you use to prep. Also physical science is my weakest section so any tips for that in particular as well?</p>
<p>thanks</p>
<p>A1. Study hard. (Practice<em>Practice)^10^10
A2. Kaplan, Examkrackers, Princeton.
A3. Study hard. (Practice</em>Practice)^10^10</p>
<p>Princeton review is terrible i hear....stay away from it.</p>
<p>Having just used a PR book for the LSAT, I can tell you that their philosophy generally is more cynical than I would like, regarding their attitude towards standardized testing generally. They seem to look for more "tricks" than I would've preferred.</p>
<p>Of course, I'm sure their LSAT division is diff't from the MCAT division, but that's just my experience with PR.</p>
<p>TPR doesn't emphasize knowledge because they expect you to have a certain amt. from your college classes. They'll teach you what you have to know and also give you some strategies (or "tricks" as BDM called it) to doing well on the test.</p>
<p>I thought MCATs were more a measure of cognitive ability than actual knowledge. I mean, obviously you have to study hard in order to understand the questions they're asking, but if you study hard and have a good history with standardized test-taking, can a good score be expected?</p>
<p>You're right, it is testing critical thinking ability. They use the sciences as a vehicle for testing that. There are many questions that ask for you to assess scientific knowledge, so having an understanding of the basic concepts is important to know what fits and what doesn't, but you still have to be able to determine the important parts of the question, which knowledge you need to access, and how to use it. Simply knowing all the physics formulas is useless if you don't understand why to use them.</p>
<p>Typically people who have done well on standardized tests in the past do well on standardized tests in the future. I read a stat on another message board the other day that most people are within +/- 2 points of their ACT score on the MCAT. Not sure how true that is, though it did happen that way for me in which I scored the same on both. There are proven correlations between MCAT Verbal and USMLE scores on the first try.</p>
<p>Isn't the ACT total 36 points, while the MCAT total is 45?!>?!
Or do you mean a +/- 2 of an ACT score scaled with the MCAT...?</p>
<p>Is doing well on standardized testing an innate ability<>? Can't it be learned with sheer hardwork and practice?</p>
<p>The ACT maxes out at 36. To be beyond BRM's "error bar" of +2 points, then, you'd have to be getting better than a 38 on the MCAT, or in the top 0.7% of MCAT test-takers (7 out of 1000), so the higher scaling on the MCAT is generally not relevant.</p>
<p>There are strategies you can use to improve your ability on standardized tests...making good scratchwork (crossing wrong answers out), recognizing wrong answers, answering all the questions, avoiding the temptation to change answers when you go back and check your work, skipping questions that seem like they are going to take too much time, and so on. </p>
<p>Some people "get" this at an early age and don't necessarily understand why they excel at standardized tests. </p>
<p>The biggest "innate" ability that can help you on standardized tests is reading speed, fast readers have an advantage - particularly on passage based tests like the ACT and MCAT.</p>
<p>Now that the new MCAT is a CBT, how would one go about applying the POE. I mean do test takers even get scratch paper?</p>
<p>I would say that being good at standardized test taking is a similar or the same ability as just being "smart." You can't learn the innate ability - you can work really hard and get those study tip books and everything, but without the ability you probably can't get a score as high as someone who does all that work AND is naturally intelligent/intuitive with standardized tests.</p>
<p>I think more than practice its important to understand concepts. It paid off big for me. Some passages on the MCAT will be about material you have never seen before, and you will have to be able to understand the concepts put forth in those packages. Still, the most difficult section is VR, and the way I did well on that was practice. To tell you the truth, I'm not a good standardized test taker, but the MCAT is far from a typical standardized tests in that it really tests reasoning ability rather than test-taking skills, in my opinino.</p>