How to ace the MCAT: Part 2 - study materials

November 22, 2006

While some of my friends preferred to sign up for a Kaplan prep course, I decided to just study on my own. I felt that it would be much more efficient this way. Here are some of the ways I envisioned a Kaplan course would waste my time and money:

- I would have to spend at least an hour each day just getting to and from the class site (20 minutes driving to class + 20 minutes driving home + 10 minutes parking and walking). This is an extra hour each day I could have been studying!
- Class time would invariably be wasted each day for the following purposes: 1) the instructor introducing him/herself to the class, 2) the instructor asking questions to the class, with no one volunteering an answer, resulting in awkward and wasted silence, 3) the instructor speaking more slowly than I could read
- Tuition for a Kaplan course is ridiculously expensive: $1649!! I ended up buying review books online for less than $300, saving at least $1,200!

The books I bought online were basically miscellaneous Kaplan and Examkrackers review books. It's basically not too important which study materials you use (all the review books were pretty much the same), but rather how you use them. I read quickly through the books just once. Sure, it was tempting to pore back and forth through each chapter, memorizing every little detail, but with the sheer volume of pages, I felt that this simply was not a smart thing to do. There was no way I could do that in the limited time that I had, and memorization was just not physically possible for me when there was such a huge amount of information to absorb. So, I sprinted through all of the books and didn't look back.

I used the practice questions included in each of the books to review and apply what I just read. I found that the questions were very close to questions on the real MCAT.