Your intellectual potential—how skillfully you annex new territory into your mental boundaries, how quickly you build “thought highways” between ideas, how confidently and creatively you solve problems—is far more important to admission committees than your ability to recite Young’s modulus for every material known to man. The schools assume they can expand your knowledge base. They choose applicants carefully because expansive knowledge is not enough to succeed in medical school or in the profession. There’s something more. It’s this “something more” that the MCAT is trying to measure.
Every section on the MCAT tests essentially the same higher-order thinking skills: analytical reasoning, abstract thinking, and problem solving. Most test takers get trapped into thinking they are being tested strictly about biology, chemistry, and so on. Thus, they approach each section with a new outlook on what’s expected. This constant mental gear-shifting can be exhausting, not to mention counterproductive. Instead of perceiving the test as parsed into radically different sections, you need to maintain your focus on the underlying nature of the test: It’s designed to test your thinking skills, not your information-recall skills. Each test section presents a variation on the same theme.
WHAT ABOUT THE SCIENCE?
With this perspective, you may be left asking these questions: “What about the science? What about the content? Don’t I need to know the basics?” The answer is a resounding “Yes!” You must be fluent in the different languages of the test. You cannot do well on the MCAT if you don’t know the basics of physics, general chemistry, biology, and organic chemistry. We recommend that you take one year each of biology, general chemistry, organic chemistry, and physics before taking the MCAT, and that you review the content in this book thoroughly. Knowing these basics is just the beginning of doing well on the MCAT. That’s a shock to most test takers. They presume that once they recall or relearn their undergraduate science, they are ready to do battle against the MCAT. Wrong! They merely have directions to the battlefield. They lack what they need to beat the test: a copy of the test maker’s battle plan!
You won’t be drilled on facts and formulas on the MCAT. You’ll need to demonstrate ability to reason based on ideas and concepts. The science questions are painted with a broad brush, testing your general understanding.
TAKE CONTROL: THE MCAT MINDSET
In addition to being a thinking test, as we’ve stressed, the MCAT is a standardized test. As such, it has its own consistent patterns and idiosyncrasies that can actually work in your favor. This is the key to why test preparation works. You have the opportunity to familiarize yourself with those consistent peculiarities, to adopt the proper test-taking mindset.
The following are some overriding principles of the MCAT mindset that will be covered in depth in the chapters to come:
• Read actively and critically.
• Translate prose into your own words.
• Save the toughest questions for last.
• Know the test and its components inside and out.
• Do MCAT-style problems in each topic area after you’ve reviewed it.
• Allow your confidence to build on itself.
• Take full-length practice tests a week or two before the test to break down the mystique of the real experience.
• Learn from your mistakes—get the most out of your practice tests.
• Look at the MCAT as a challenge, the first step in your medical career, rather than as an arbitrary obstacle.
That’s what the MCAT mindset boils down to: Taking control. Being proactive. Being on top of the testing experience so that you can get as many points as you can as quickly and as easily as possible. Keep this in mind as you read and work through the material in this book and, of course, as you face the challenge on Test Day.
Now that you have a better idea of what the MCAT is all about, let’s take a tour of the individual test sections. Although the underlying skills being tested are similar, each MCAT section requires that you call into play a different domain of knowledge. So, though we encourage you to think of the MCAT as a holistic and unified test, we also recognize that the test is segmented by discipline and that there are characteristics unique to each section. In the overviews, we’ll review sample questions and answers and discuss section-specific strategies. For each of the sections—Verbal Reasoning, Physical/Biological Sciences, and the Writing Sample—we’ll present you with the following:
• The Big Picture
You’ll get a clear view of the section and familiarize yourself with what it’s really evaluating.
• A Closer Look
You’ll explore the types of questions that will appear and master the strategies you’ll need to deal with them successfully.
• Highlights
The key approaches to each section are outlined, for reinforcement and quick review.
TEST EXPERTISE
The first year of medical school is a frenzied experience for most students. In order to meet the requirements of a rigorous work schedule, students either learn to prioritize and budget their time or else fall hopelessly behind. It’s no surprise, then, that the MCAT, the test specifically designed to predict success in the first year of medical school, is a high-speed, time-intensive test. It demands excellent time-management skills as well as that sine qua non of the successful physician—grace under pressure.
It’s one thing to answer a Verbal Reasoning question correctly; it’s quite another to answer several correctly in a limited time frame. The same goes for Physical and Biological Sciences—it’s a whole new ballgame once you move from doing an individual passage at your leisure to handling a full section under actual timed conditions. You also need to budget your time for the Writing Sample, but this section isn’t as time sensitive. When it comes to the multiple-choice sections, time pressure is a factor that affects virtually every test taker.
So when you’re comfortable with the content of the test, your next challenge will be to take it to the next level—test expertise—which will enable you to manage the all-important time element of the test.
THE FIVE BASIC PRINCIPLES OF TEST EXPERTISE
On some tests, if a question seems particularly difficult you’ll spend significantly more time on it, as you’ll probably be given more points for correctly answering a hard question. Not so on the MCAT. Remember, every MCAT question, no matter how hard, is worth a single point. There’s no partial credit or “A” for effort, and because there are so many questions to do in so little time, you’d be a fool to spend 10 minutes getting a point for a hard question and then not have time to get a couple of quick points from three easy questions later in the section.
Given this combination—limited time, all questions equal in weight—you’ve got to develop a way of handling the test sections to make sure you get as many points as you can as quickly and easily as you can. Here are the principles that will help you do that:
1. FEEL FREE TO SKIP AROUND
One of the most valuable strategies to help you finish the sections in time is to learn to recognize and deal first with the questions that are easier and more familiar to you. That means you must temporarily skip those that promise to be difficult and time-consuming, if you feel comfortable doing so. You can always come back to these at the end, and if you run out of time, you’re much better off not getting to questions you may have had difficulty with, rather than not getting to potentially feasible material. Of course, because there’s no guessing penalty, always put an answer to every question on the test, whether you get to it or not. (It’s not practical to skip passages, so do those in order.)