what's up guys it's Justin back again with another video and if you couldn't help with the title today we're going through what I did to score 520 on the MCAT in the most simple way possible of course I can only speak on my experiences but I really do think that anyone following the basics of this strategy should be able to succeed the MCAT is hard and the MCAT is important so without further Ado let's get into the video thumbcat is probably very different from any other tests that you've ever taken so that means you're gonna have to prepare differently than you have in the past if you can I recommend three months of dedicated studying time and by that I mean your sole focus is the MCAT for traditional students this might mean taking the summer to study but if you don't have that luxury do not worry you can stretch the three months for as long as you need for me I took about six months of study I studied four or four months while working in a research lab and had two months solely dedicated to MCAT so first things first let's go over what's tested on the MCAT you have four sections the first being chemistry and physical sciences the second being your critical analysis and reasoning skills the third being biology and biochemistry and the fourth being psychology and sociology of course you take classes like biology biochemistry and physics as a pre-med so you'll be good right well wrong the first thing you're going to have to do is content review it takes a couple of years to get through other pre-med courses that cover MCAT material so there's a good chance that by the time you're finally taking biochemistry you've already forgotten all of your general chemistry and this is where your MCAT prep books are going to come in handy these books are the first purchase that I recommend making I personally went with Kaplan and have no problem recommending them once you have your handy dandy MCAT review books I would aim to do about two to three chapters per day and see how that works out for you once you get into the flow of things you can add and subtract chapters as you see fit not sounding too bad right well there's another pivotal step in your content review phase and that is Anki Anki is a space repetition tool used by many MCAT study goers and for very good reason there's something called the forgetting curve let's say you study biology chapters one and two today in a couple of weeks you're probably going to forget most of it but if you continue to review what you learned in those chapters strategically you're going to retain a lot more of that information anki's algorithm takes all the guesswork out of it for you and feeds you cards as you need them I recommend checking out the ankings guide to using Anki for the MCAT and you'll be even happier to know that pre-med students have paved the way for efficient studying by making pre-made Anki decks I use the Jack Sparrow deck and have no problem recommending it props to him by the way Jack Sparrow 2048 if you're watching this you're a legend my study flow for this space was to do any existing Anki cards that I had to read more chapters and then yet again do more Anki cards related to the chapter that I just read I did this until I read all the books with the exception of the psych social book and the cars book for the psychology and sociology section of the MCAT there are condensed documents on R MCAT on Reddit that makes studying way more efficient I personally use the 86 page Dock and scored a 132 on the section so I have no problems recommending that same deal here unlock relevant Anki cards as you go and now we have cars which is a whole different beast and probably the most hated section on the MCAT my strategy to improving my core score was to do practice is on Jack Weston I would take as much time as I needed to get questions right and once I was finally able to consistently get questions right untimed I sent a timer for about 13 minutes and started working down from there if you can get to a place where you're taking about seven minutes to read a passage and two to three minutes to answer the questions you'll be in a good spot the last resource that I recommend for a Content review is Khan Academy if you're anything like me Khan Academy has saved your bud multiple times throughout your college career and it comes to the rescue yet again I use Khan Academy to supplement my review books for especially challenging Concepts okay so quick review of everything we just covered use your chosen MCAT study books to build a foundation along with the Reddit documents for sex OSH and Jack Weston for cars use Anki to help you retain that information and use Khan Academy the things you need more help understanding trust me you don't want to spend too much time on this phase of studying in a traditional three-month study plan I recommend no more than one month of content review if the first phase of your studying is content review the second phase is practice questions yes you need to know a lot of material for the MCAT what's equally important is applying that information to answer questions so you're probably wondering where you find practice questions I recommend you world as they have good AMC style questions and really great explanations to their answers my workflow in this stage was pretty similar to my content review phase first I would do any existing Anki cards that I do to get some momentum then I would open up your world and start on my practice questions I chose to split up my days doing either chem Fizz buy a biochem or psychos while doing about 60 Questions at a time to emulate a real MCAT section I did cars practice every day because I suck the cars I would then review my practice questions use Khan Academy for anything I needed more help on and then make my own Anki cards for the questions I got wrong and tracked these questions in an Excel sheet okay so now picture this you've done all of your content review You've Done your Anki you're doing your practice questions there's one last thing you need to do and that is practice exams I used some blueprint practice exams but the most important resource here is going to be the AMC full links I would space them out so you're doing an AMC full length every week before your exam this means taking an AMC full length every week for about five weeks before your exam take these tests seriously and mimic test day as best as you can after all it's going to give you a good idea where your score May lie and what areas you might need an improvement on I took two days to review each full-length exam and made sure to update my very long spreadsheet of the questions I got wrong and why I got them wrong my basic flow for this phase of studying was to take a full length on Saturday take a break on Sunday and then review half of my phone linked on Monday and the second half on Tuesday once I finish my full-length exam I worked on finishing out uworld and the AMC question packs and more importantly the section Banks so let's review the study plan from the very beginning first you're going to read through MCAT prep books doing about two chapters a day use the Reddit document for sex soch and Jack Weston for cars if something is confusing hop on over to the Khan Academy then unlock Anki cards for the material you just read and do this every day even One Missed day will make you miserable because you have to catch up next sprinkle in practice questions once you finish some of your MCAT prep books and continue doing content review once you've read your MCAT prep books and the psycho shreddit document work up to doing about 60 practice questions at a time as you gain stamina you can work towards doing upwards of 120 questions a day which is equivalent to happinessian at the bare minimum do one full-length exam a week every week before your test date if you want more practice you can add in Blueprint full-length exams before you start AMC material and lastly review your full links thoroughly and complete the AMC question packs and section Banks so that's basically it don't worry if you feel overwhelmed I promise that's perfectly normal just remember that this is only a loose framework of a study plan what worked for me might not work for you so don't be afraid to modify this plan and use different resources happy studying and I'll see you guys in the next one foreign