if you're like me when i first started studying for the mcat i really didn't read all the passages and i dang sure didn't understand them but today what i'm going to show you is what the mcat was really trying to tell you with the passages and how to pull some of the clues out from them to answer some of the questions right [Music] the strategy that we use to do this and to figure out what the passage is telling us and to map it out it's called the flowchart method and it goes by a million different names if you go on reddit or student doctor network or you talk to your local mcat tutor you'll hear it called passage mapping or passage diagramming um it really goes by a bunch of different names but what i call it is the flowchart method because as you'll see one of my examples it kind of looks like a flowchart the basic premise behind the flowchart method is that the mcat is actually going to tell you what it's going to test you on i mean not literally tell you like there's no talking in the testing center and the test can't talk but it's going to give you hints and clues as to what could potentially be on your exam and a good test taker knows how to pick up on those hints and clues and how to really capitalize on those and use them to their advantage another way to look at this is i'm kind of teaching you how to cut down on some of the fluff because there are a lot of things on the mcat that are in the passages that you are not supposed to have known if you see protein nrx69w underscore zy you're not supposed to know what that does okay but you're supposed to be able to use the clues and the hints and the basic sciences that they give you in the passage to figure out what it does and tease out the relevant information and the flowchart method is how i do that now when it comes to mastering the flowchart method there's really a couple steps that you need to keep in mind the first one is you need to understand what is important in the passage right if you're going to pull it out you need to understand what is important so that you know what to pay attention to because otherwise you're just going to get you're just going to feel like you're getting slapped in the face by 700 word essay because you kind of are those two things are basic sciences and relationships or at least that's what i call them now the basic sciences is a little tricky because when it comes to basic sciences what i mean is we are looking for any science that you remember from your mcat prep book and i don't care which one that is or from your undergraduate classes your core classes i know there's some of you that have taken astrophysics and dolphin biology and things like that and we're not really worried about those but if you remember from general biology or biochemistry if you see enzyme or amino acid that's a basic science okay that's one of the things that you want to pay attention to are basic sciences and the reason it's so difficult is because i expect my students and i expect you now to begin identifying those basic sciences before you've even finished reading your content book the second thing that i'm looking for from a passage that has been shown time and time again to be tested frequently just like basic sciences are relationships now relationships can be any linkage between two things and i know that's incredibly vague but that's because it could be a direct relationship you could say hormone x causes impact y or it could even be saying that our new molecule is actually a neuron specific gaba inhibitor something like that anything like that if you see a link between two molecules or really two sciences whether you're familiar with those sciences or not that's going to be a relationship and i really emphasize using arrows pretty heavily in this portion of your flowchart method although i'm kind of an arrow slot i like them everywhere but that's kind of the first step is figuring out what exactly belongs in your flow chart and it's basic sciences and relationships and then the second step is figuring out how to place them in your flow chart you know how to organize this because if it's there and it's just listed out that may be helpful but it wouldn't probably be quite as helpful as if you could capture the overall flow of the passage this is where it's going to be a little bit individual individualistic your flow chart should be easy to interpret for you my flow charts aren't going to look exactly like yours all the the all the time but they're going to have the same contents now this generally works best with arrows and abbreviations because i mean you've got to keep in mind the test is timed right so you can't you can't rewrite the passage uh or spend even even really more than five or six minutes on a passage otherwise you're just going to run out of time on the questions but whatever shorthand you prefer is going to be best just a way to keep it concise and accurate the third step to really mastering flow charting is just becoming efficient it's going to take you a long time at first i mean i'm rewriting the way that you read i'm rewriting i'm telling you what to pay attention to and it's things that you normally would have skimmed over so kind of rewriting this process and coming to a point where you are not only paying attention to these basic sciences and these relationships but now you're writing them out and you're a little confused about the reason why and the purpose it's going to take you a little bit longer at first so expect to see some negative performance outcomes at the beginning but that's because we're laying down a foundation to really build upon because most students make the fatal mistake of thinking that their improvement is going to come on the right side of the page meaning the questions at the beginning and honestly at the very end as well your major improvements will come from the left side of the page meaning the passage so now that you've seen the steps to the flowchart method it's really important that you kind of see it in action so i went ahead and screen clipped a passage from the wmc official guide the bb sections passage 5 i believe so i'm going to read it to you and this is actually what it looks like whenever i'm reading this passage these are the things that i pay attention to so as you can see on the right hand side of the screen is my passage and then on the left hand side of the screen i'm going to take some notes then but that would typically be on scratch paper but nevertheless here we go so at the beginning it's talking about cell differentiation traditionally cell differentiation lineage commitment are thought of as robust irreversible developmental processes the only thing that i really remember from like a general biology course about that is cell diff no relationships there recently however has been shown that fibroblasts can be reprogrammed to a pluripotent state with a combination of transcription factors that right there is a pretty big relationship it's a link between fibroblasts and this pluripotent state and the link is transcription factors so i'm going to go ahead and write that down because it seems it seems like a turning point in this passage already so let's say fibroblasts transformed into pluripotent cells using transcription factors these results have caused scientists to question whether specific transcription factors could induce other defined somatic cell fates and not just an undifferentiated state that's actually a pretty interesting science so it's this idea of um there's a little side science lesson but essentially the differentiation states are totally potent pluripotent multipotent and then you become fully differentiated so you can become a somatic cell of any kind it could be a toenail or a taste bud and what they're essentially saying fiberglass down here is generally we only go downstream however they have found that we have the ability to go upstream using transcription factors and that's unique so we can take this defined cell use a transcription factor and make it pluripotent again and what they're curious about this hypothesis that they just laid out for us right here on the last sentence is whether or not we can actually take a specific transcription factor and come back down to a different cell so can we take a fibroblast and make it into a neuron very similar to could we take a toenail and make it into a taste bud i'm just not quite as dramatic the scientists set out to test whether neural linear specific transcription factors could convert embryonic fiber blasts from tau egfp mice you see how this is just a big long run-on sentence you're gonna have to break it up and so the commas are excellent breaks so make sure once you get to a comma if you're in the center of a giant sentence like this take the time to say do i actually understand what the heck we're talking about already and so here they're really just taking transcription factors from neurons and converting this fibroblast converting them into what into neurons okay so they kind of skip the inside part where they're just describing what green fluorescent protein is okay so can we take fibroblasts from tau egfp mice and can we use these transcription factors that are neuron specific and can we turn them into a neuron that's a huge relationship figure one i i i will jump in we'll jump into figures a little bit later but for the most part they usually get skipped or briefly glanced over so 12 days after infection scientists observed the presence of cells that displayed bright green fluorescence and we're positive for two to one okay so 12 days after we use this transcription factor we get some cells they are positive for gfp which means they are from this this lineage right actually kind of be your basic science there which reminds me i forgot to list it and they're also positive for two one [Music] two one so what is touch one because i don't remember that for my from a undergraduate course it actually tells you which one is a neuron specific class three beta tubulin okay so something that's really really important helpful on the mcat and this gets into a strategy that's a little bit more advanced that i call foreshadowing but i'm gonna go ahead and introduce it now because this passage is so good for it anytime that the mcat introduces something new like a new science like tujuan then they give you a big fat comma and then they give you an explanation of what that new science is it is very likely that you're going to get asked a question that essentially says what is this new science or how is it applied or how is it helpful in our experiment and the only way for you to get that right is if you spend your time focusing on these basic sciences that's what they're really asking they're not hoping that you memorize touj one from some obscure book or something like that they just want to know can you answer based off of the basic sciences okay so that's what we write down in our flow chart then so 2j1 the basic science is here is that 2j1 is neuron specific you probably remember tubulin from some of your classes it's a protein but that would be as far as i would go so i would say it's neuron specific protein that's as far as i would go okay these cells also express several neuron specific proteins including new n so they're doing it again new n which binds dna so i'm going to say new n and then i'll use my abbreviation for binds dna that's how i've always done it i don't know why but that's how i do it tests revealed that while the majority of the fluorescent cells produce the excitatory neurotransmitter gaba and then they give you the structure which is weird in and of itself it's another example of foreshadowing a few produce inhibitory neurotransmitter gaba so some produce excitatory glutamate sorry and some produce inhibitory gaba okay so we've got gaba being produced which is inhibitory and then glutamate which is excitatory and then we actually get their structures which generally tells you you're going to get asked a question based on their structure um but we'll see if they ask us those on this passage this is a few this is much like neurons from the central nervous system okay it does not say that these behave that these are neurons from the central nervous system it just says that they are cranking out glutamate and gaba and neurons from the central nervous system also crank out glutamate and gaba okay don't make too much of that relationship these cells are not equal to cns cells they just make certain neurotransmitters like cns cells but the cns is a basic science so go ahead and write that down so moving on says in subsequent experiments the scientists examined how each of the five transcription factors affected the production of two to one positive cells by removing a single factor from the original five factor pool so here they're just kind of describing their approach to gathering these results to what the experiment really is and then it tells us that the results are shown in figure two and so we have a strategy called figure interpretation that i'll dive into a little bit later that will help us with you know figuring out what you actually need to do as far as interpreting this weird picture it looks like charmander's getting sliced up or something kind of made my eight-year-old heart cry or how to interpret this this graph that's got a bunch of things that i've never heard on it um and so we'll dive into that a little bit later but for the purposes of the flowchart method this right here is all that you would need to know to get the questions correct on the mcat so if you know this and you know your required basic sciences you really shouldn't be too worried about this passage on the mcat so just to summarize these are going to be your basic sciences the rest of this is going to be your relationships so take some time to make sure that you understand the difference between the basic sciences and the relationships because this strategy is one that is going to build and build and build so that's the flowchart method i'll show you some of the questions that came along with that passage and you tell me whether or not you think it helped [Music] make sure to like this video comment on it share it subscribe to the channel and if you have any passages that you want to see flowcharted out go ahead and comment on below