<p>I have noticed the link to the MCAT Secrets Study Guide on this site. Has anyone purchased this guide and was it helpful?</p>
<p>How about ExamKrackers?</p>
<p>Basically to me it looks like they're teaching the following from the e-mails they're offering</p>
<p>For physical sciences - basic math skills. Being able to quickly perform calculations is high yield if you can do it accurately. So many people get caught up on the math which slows them down. When I taught Kaplan (and physics was my main section of teaching) I ALWAYS told students to skip any question with calculations.</p>
<p>For VR - doesn't look to me like he's going to an appropriate depth. But considering that many students with poor scores have poor vocabularies and difficulty in using context to aid reading comprehension, "synonym analysis" might help. The girl who taught with me my first year used to say that "keywords" were like giant flashing neon signs within a passage telling you something important (however, I personally suck at finding and ID'ing keywords). </p>
<p>Writing - lends itself to systems. Not important and easy to make into a system.</p>
<p>Bio - that's pretty much the sum of the whole test right there. "Advanced test taking techniques and understanding of basic concepts"</p>
<p>Basically - yeah, this probably works. Nothing they're selling is groundbreaking however, and they're capitalizing on the fears of many, many people. People get far too worked up over the MCAT and make it into something it's not. The biggest thing is that it is a test several layers deeper than something like the SAT or ACT. It requires you to be proficient at those less complex skills. You can't handle the VR passages if your reading comprehension is mediocre. But the high scores require more than just the basic skills. </p>
<p>The farther I get into medical school, the more I think the MCAT does a pretty good job of testing essential skills for future physicians. The MCAT gives you the basic information, then asks you to think about it with a critical mind, thinking about how new information might change the info presented or challenging the test-taker to think about basics in a new light or context. This is pretty similar to what physicians do each day. Let me give you an example of a case I just got done with in the ER at the rural hospital I'm doing a family medicine clerkship at for another two weeks.</p>
<p>Lady comes in with lower abdominal pain that has been bothering her for a week. Pain gets better and worse with no real sequence or trigger. The pain is in the midline, not in one of the sides where we might be able to say definitely appendicitis or gall bladder issues. </p>
<p>The next step, while asking more questions is to begin thinking about all the things it might be - pregnancy, kidney stone, pancreatitis, ulcer, diverticular disease, Crohn's, Pelvic inflammatory disease, aortic aneurysm, so on and so forth. With just that amount of history, I'm sure a class full of medical students could come up with about 50 things it might be. </p>
<p>As we continue asking questions, some things become more likely, some impossible. With each question, my preceptor and I are getting more information with which to deal with, info we must apply to what we already know about this patient, about what sort of things are possible, what sort of anatomy exists and so on. My preceptor of course also has nearly 30 years of practice and experience to draw on, but even I can use my basic (and admittedly incomplete) medical knowledge to think of possibilities. The info we have then leads us to figure out what lab tests are appropriate (which is the real trick of medical education - a class of M1's is going to order every test in the book). With those lab results, we further refine our differential excluding things, considering what types of co-morbidities she has, how those affect the lab results and so on. </p>
<p>All this is eerily sort of similar to the standard MCAT question where they present two authors/scientists' opinions and then ask the question "Assume the following is true (X+H+17-Q=MCAT success) which author's argument would be most helped?" Basically, take the information you have, understand it, take this new piece of information, plug it into each viewpoint, and determine which argument is strengthened. Much like taking lab results and saying item A on a differential is much more likely than item B.</p>
<p>What I'm getting at, is that many people get freaked about the MCAT because they think they have to know every chemistry concept backward and forward. In reality, you need to be able to "get" the science enough to think about it. It sounds like this website is trying to get that message across. How well they do it, and how much value there is, I don't know. It's not something like Kaplan or TPR prep courses where there are guarantees, tons of practice materials, support of teachers and center staff, web sites, and so on. Could this be a scam? Sure. Could it really work? Yeah. Would I give my money to some random person on the internet? I wouldn't, I'd rather to give my money (even if it was more expensive) to something that's a little bit more trustworthy, but some people might.</p>
<p>Thanks so much for the details!</p>
<p><a href="X+H+17-Q=MCAT%20success">quote</a>
[/quote]
<em>is confused</em></p>
<p>I always thought it was X+H+18-Q=MCAT success. No wonder I keep messing up.</p>
<p>Would you have preferred I put "inverse(Dog)=cow, therefore inverse(cow)=dog"?</p>