Скачать или смотреть MCAT Studying Strategies: How to Focus Your Studying on Knowledge Gaps and Get Past Score Stagnation

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Hello Everyone,

In this video we will be covering a few strategies for MCAT Studying, specifically how to focus your studying on knowledge gaps.

Most people spend a majority of time reviewing concepts by reading chapters/notes and practice exam by taking full sections and practice tests. We are going to go through what could be making your score stagnant and how to instead focus on knowledge gaps.

Problems with this method:
-- Reading through source material is lengthy and you already know a good portion of the material
-- People have a tendency when reading to focus most of their attention on what they already know.
-- Most people take extensive notes, making it similar to reviewing a textbook

Practice Tests do Not Test Everything:
-- Some people believe that the more practice tests you take, the better you will do.
The difficulty is that it will help if you have specific weaknesses: Test Endurance, Anxiety during the test, Timing issues.
-- However, practice tests are not the best method for identifying knowledge gaps and fixing them

Solution – Tutor Mode Practice Questions with Focus Review
1. Take practice questions for a give section.
2. When you are reading a passage, the question, or the answer choices and identify a concept you know you should know (such as amino acids, equations for physics, hormones) take note of this.
3. Answer the question to the best of your abilities
4. Even if you get this question right, immediately stop taking practice questions, go back to your notes or study material and review the difficult concept. Review the material surrounding it as well, this is a knowledge gap!

A single missed question on a small topic could indicate a problem of a large topic. For instance, if you don’t know the function of ribosomes, you most likely need to review gene transcription and translation as a whole. Another example, if you don’t remember the equation for current in a circuit, you most likely need to review the equations for circuits in general

Lastly -- How to Effectively Take Notes
General Principle – Only Write Down What is Important, and You do Not Know
-- Many people, myself included, focus on writing down everything that we believe is important. Unfortunately, that is 80% of a chapter most of the time.
-- This makes note taking tedious and a lengthy process
-- Instead, try to only write down what is important AND what you do not understand. Ideally, this will cut down your notes to 20-30% of a given chapter and really focus your limited time on content you are having problems with.

I hope this video was helpful and I wish you the best in your MCAT preparation! Please comment down below if you have any questions, tips or suggestions for future videos. If you found this useful, subscribe to our channel and click that notification bell to get notified of our future videos on MCAT prep, applications (for college, grad school, and medical school), and content review for sciences classes ranging from biology and physics, all the way up to medical school.

Best,

MedSciMentor