Kaplan MCAT 45: Advanced Prep for Advanced Students

obviously not everyone who reads this book will get a 45. That said, this was the only book i used. No one book will get you a 45. to get a "45" you need to be in the 37-45 range knowledge-wise and get really lucky on test day. This book is good (and i'd reccomend it to everyone) for teaching you NOT to freak when you get hit with a nasty passage and for teaching you how to think when background knowledge can't help you out. I know that in my free mcat test prep program, i will encourage all of my students to get and work through this book- you just need to be very clear that this is not what the MCAT will consist of, and that after suffering through this book, the real test will be that much easier. To be honest this book is EXACTLY what is says it is. It's brutal and it will help you a lot if you're in the top group of test takers and a marginal amount if you're not. I ended up with a 15PS 15BS and 13VR for a 43S. Did this book get me that score? heck no. did it help somewhat? yeah. spend the 20 bucks here and ditch the worthless 1500 dollar prep course (i never took any form of paid-prep). if you enroll in rough classes and review your textbooks, you can do as well if not better; just be realistic.

This was the most valuable of the many books I used to prepare for the MCAT. I started using it when my diagnostic scores hit 34; at that point most of the material out there was a waste of my time. I really need super-hard passages to practice on. I worked through every passage in this book, which usually meant doing it once in the appropriate amount of time, then spending a few hours re-learning the very hardest material. By the end of my prep, I wasn't attending my Princeton Revew course anymore; I was just working alone with several supplementary textbooks for 1st year med students, and these really difficult passages. It's an illusion that any one course or book will prepare you for the MCAT. What I did was chart my own course through the material. I regularly assessed what material I knew well, and what material I needed to really zero in on. No book or prep program can know as well as you do what material you don't know. Be *active* in your prep. Remember that doing passages is not enough; you have to learn the material at a higher level than you needed to for your pre-med courses. Another thing to keep in mind is timing. If you're getting solidly in the mid 30s, you should stop wasting time figuring out which passages to do and which to skip. The fastest way through is to do all of the questions in order. I had 5 minutes or more left in each of the sections except writing sample. The key thing, the absolute key, is to regularly prepare with passages that are killers. That way the actual exam feels easy, and you get practice reasoning through the toughest stuff. For every single passage you do, and especially the hard ones, if you get the answer wrong or had to guess, review the material associated with the entire passage. Frequently you'll have to re-learn it at a deeper level. Build rules of thumb as you go, and keep track of them on paper. I found it useful to keep track of the sorts of questions/topics I got wrong, and build a list of heuristics to get them *right*. Note, though, that the name of this book is misleading. Since VR scoring only goes up to 13, the highest score possible is 15 + 15 + 13 = 43. For the writing sample, the highest score possible is T. So, yes, I got a 42 T, which is one point below the highest score possible. But here's the thing: I'm bright, but I'm not a genius. What I am is extremely motivated, and I worked extremely hard from November to April preparing for this test. Great scores are possible. This book isn't the whole package; you'll have to build your own whole package -- but include this book in it.