Quick Review of Old MCAT

Hey friends!

So as I said earlier, I took both the old and new MCAT. While the old one is no longer offered, I would be remiss if I did not at least mention it briefly and how I studied for it in the context of how it shaped my preparation for studying for the new MCAT exam. So, here goes!

From the first day of my prep course to my actual exam date was almost 3 months exactly. My course lasted about 2 months, where I spent 2 hours in a classroom 6 days a week. My study schedule during the course was this: I would wake up around 9:30am, walk the convenient 10 minute stroll to my class at UCLA and be in class from 10am-12pm. I would then grab a quick lunch and power through studying until around 1am-2am every night (except for the days of the week when I didn't have class, those were basically my "cheat days", which I'll get to in a moment), only stopping for quick dinner, gym and shower breaks. On my days off, I would get up around the same time and work until 4-5pm, then take the rest of the night off for a well-deserved (and much needed break), spending time with my boyfriend and friends and trying to de-stress as much as possible.

The prep course I used for the old MCAT (The Berkeley Review) is a small course only available in California, but it's basically like any other course in that it has a schedule each day for what topics you learn, homework/practice problems, etc. so it is easily translatable to TPR or Kaplan. Every day I would go to class and take notes in a spiral notebook. After class, I took notes by hand from the book first before doing any of the assigned practice problems (I'll talk much more later on why I read first before doing problems). This was time consuming of course, and usually I did not finish until around dinner time, but it almost always gave me a solid understanding of that day's topic and allowed me to do most of the assigned problems without having to keep checking the reading for further clarification. Finally, I would try to do as many of the assigned problems before going to bed (1:30-2:00am always being my cutoff for being in bed with lights off), saving whatever I didn't finish for the next day or my "cheat days."

I took 19 full tests before taking my actual exam. Almost all of these were taken after my course ended in early August, only taking 3 (maybe 4 tops...it's been almost a year now) before my course ended. I'll talk more later on about why I think this is the best way to take practice tests. Below is a screen shot of my practice test scores (which I highly recommend keeping a detailed spreadsheet on every test and section to chart your progress and pinpoint your strengths and weaknesses).

*TBR are The Berkley Review tests (from my prep course), AAMC are the released tests from AAMC that I purchased through the website, and GS are Gold Standard tests, a private company with notoriously harder tests. The 4 red GS tests are from my "cheat days" when I didn't have the strength/energy/time to take a full test and just wanted to focus on my weakest areas (physical and verbal). Also, the TBR tests were annoying because they sometimes gave ranges of scores instead of a precise score, hence why TBR 5-8 have ranges.

*My final score: Physical 11 (about normal for my scores, maybe on the lower end), Verbal 7 (as you can see, an absolute train wreck compared to how I normally did), Biological 11 (again, about normal and maybe on lower end compared to how I was scoring at the end).

After taking each test, I would chill out on the couch and go through each problem, creating a word document and jotting down any problem that flummoxed me or I thought was tricky, so I could keep a catalog of things that were stumping me or that I just wanted to keep track of.

That's about all there is to say about my experience with the old MCAT. I'll get much more in detail about my study habits for the new test, so I'll summarize with these few highlights:

• I put in a lot of time reading and taking notes to build a knowledge base
• I waited until the end of the course to start taking tests
• I took as many tests as possible from as many sources as possible to try and be prepared for everything

If there's any other info you want to know about the old MCAT and how I studied for that, just let me know!



~Our greatest weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to succeed is always to try just one more time~