Hi,
I admit that I just started my prep and pre-reqs < month ago. I have only seen Kaplan review guide for MCAT at the local book stores. i have heard about Flowers & Silver (hope I got the name right). How do I order one? Considering I am just starting my classwork, will it be worthwhile to get it? What other material would you recommend? i want to keep doing the MCAT prep in parallel w/ my class work.
Thx!
Quote:
Hi,
I admit that I just started my prep and pre-reqs < month ago. I have only seen Kaplan review guide for MCAT at the local book stores. i have heard about Flowers & Silver (hope I got the name right). How do I order one? Considering I am just starting my classwork, will it be worthwhile to get it? What other material would you recommend? i want to keep doing the MCAT prep in parallel w/ my class work.
Thx!
I personally found the Flowers manual pretty useless. I’m using primarily EK, but also have TPR and Kaplan exams to take AFTER I finish reviewing my textbooks and go through the EK study schedule.
EK Rocks!! I am using both the books and the audio CD’s. I walk to and from work now, which is about 90 minutes each way, and works better for listening to them than doing so while sitting around. I have gained an amazing amount of useful info from them, that is specific to the MCAT’s like nothing else I have seen or bought yet, and I have looked at just about everything out there that’s purchasable at this point.
Quote:Quote:
Hi,
I admit that I just started my prep and pre-reqs < month ago. I have only seen Kaplan review guide for MCAT at the local book stores. i have heard about Flowers & Silver (hope I got the name right). How do I order one? Considering I am just starting my classwork, will it be worthwhile to get it? What other material would you recommend? i want to keep doing the MCAT prep in parallel w/ my class work.
Thx!
I personally found the Flowers manual pretty useless. I’m using primarily EK, but also have TPR and Kaplan exams to take AFTER I finish reviewing my textbooks and go through the EK study schedule.
Pl. excuse my ignorance, what is “EK”?
ExamKrackers (EK), I use the audio CDs too, they are helpful if you have the time to listen to them repeatedly, I spend 2 hrs a day in the car commuting to school so it makes good use of otherwise dead time.
Yeah, they definitely take MANY repeated listenings, but that’s right on target about the “dead time.” If you have to commute, or have a period of time you workout and can listen, etc., they are really a great way to make good use of that time.
Thanks for the replies. At what point should I start using the EK or kaplan? Should I wait till I get more pre-reqs done or try to prepare for MCAT in parallel? I am real tempted to get the MCAT material but thought i would ask before spending the $$$.
Thanks!
It kind of depends on how you like to do things. You can get material now and keep track of things as you go through your courses, x-referencing stuff between the class and the MCAT prep material. However, I bought all my stuff about 6 months early. Frankly, anything before about 3 months out was premature, for me.
Another very important fact to bear in mind, is that starting after this fall’s MCAT, the MCAT is going to go through a huge change. The test will be 5.5 hours long instead of 8 or whatever it is now, and will be all computer based, as well as be (supposedly) a little bit of a different “breed” of questions. For this reason alone, I think you would be best off saving your money until closer to your date, if you are still 18 months out. For that matter, I would wait until there have been at least a few test that have been taken, so that the prep courses have time to readjust their formats and most of the “bugs” have been hopefully worked out.
Sam
I agree with Sam that 3-6 months is a reasonable amount of time to prep. Spending longer than six months is not likely to be helpful because you will begin to forget things. I would not start prepping until you have completed most if not all of the pre-reqs. (It is ok to take a test prep course or prep on your own if you have completed GC I and II, Bio I and II, Physics I and organic I, and you are currently taking organic II and/or physics II while you prep.) When you do prep, make sure to spend a significant portion of your time doing practice tests. A thorough review of the sciences is necessary, but NOT sufficient to score well on the MCAT.
Finally, I want to make sure everyone here knows that on SDN, we have an MCAT subforum where you can post questions and get them answered by volunteer advisors. The link to that subforum is http://forums.studentdoctor.net/forumdisplay.php?f=134 I am one of the co-founders and advisors, so if any of you have suggestions about what we can do to make the subforum better, please let me know. 