How to ace the MCAT: Part 1 - scheduling

November 21, 2006

Let me just come out and say that I scored extremely well on the MCAT. My 40+ score was in the 99th percentile of all medical school applicants, and I feel this gave me a huge advantage in getting interviews with medical schools. I mean, with an MCAT score in the top 1% of the applicant pool, there is no way your application won't stand out.

Yet given this score, I don't consider myself to be a genius or anything. I think anyone who is moderately smart could have scored as high as I did. I also don't think I studied harder than anyone else. In fact, I spent a little less than 2 months studying for the April MCAT while being a full-time undergraduate, versus most of my friends, who studied for 4-5 months or who did nothing but MCAT studying for an entire summer. And I still managed to score higher than 99% of all medical school applicants, including all of my hard-working friends. How did this happen?

My theory is that I just studied smarter. I accomplished this in 3 ways: 1) scheduling, 2) study materials, and 3) test-taking techniques. In this blog entry, I'll be talking about #1: scheduling.

I started studying for the MCAT early, but not too early. A lot of people think that the more you study, the better. But I disagree with this. Let me just say first off that given the nature of the test and the huge amount of information you are responsible for knowing, there is no way you can cram for the MCAT in a week. You will need to spread out the studying to a gradual pace. BUT there is also no reason for you to spend four or five months studying for the MCAT. I did two months, and I feel like that was just enough.

I think there are many downfalls to starting too early. The first is that you'll be burnt out by the time test day rolls around. Second, you probably won't remember much of what you studied more than 2 months ago anyway (can you recall all the information from a class you took last semester? I certainly can't). And third, you'll just be wasting your time if you start too early. There's not much benefit in reviewing the material more than once, and the extra time you waste in going over it one more time could have been spent doing something useful, like volunteering, exercising, sleeping, or having a life.

The important thing is not to study longer for the MCAT, but just to study smarter. During these two months, I set aside time each day specifically for MCAT studying; I treated it like a class with solid deadlines and daily assignments. I would stay up late to finish the "assigned" reading to meet the deadlines of my schedule rather than slack off if I didn't feel like doing the work. I didn't put in a whole lot of time each day for studying, but I was consistent. I spent at least 1 hour a day on MCAT-related stuff, every day. And it paid off.

And by treating the MCAT like another class, I didn't devote an unreasonable amount of time to it, either too much or too little. I was able to tuck it neatly into my full-time undergraduate course load (16 credits worth of real classes) without falling behind or getting overwhelmed.

So that's my timeline for you - two months in advance, at least 1 hour per day (I increased this to 3 or 4 hours a day the two weeks right before the exam). In my next post, I'll talk about what materials I used, and in a following post, I'll discuss which test-taking techniques I found most helpful.

See you soon!