Pursuing the medical field requires a great deal of knowledge and effort. Not to mention that being admitted into medical schools even presents a bigger challenge because of their extremely low acceptance rates. For 90 years, the Medical College Admission Test (MCAT) administered by the Association of American Medical Colleges is acknowledged as a part of the medical school’s admission processes.
Conquering the MCAT isn’t an easy task for aspiring medical students, but gearing up for it in different ways can increase one’s likelihood of passing. There’s a wide selection of studying methods for MCAT, such as gathering MCAT prep materials from Magoosh and including them into a studying routine. But, how exactly can these prep materials help you to study for the big examination?
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Here’s how:
Diagnose Your Weaknesses
Once you’ve gathered the perfect MCAT prep materials for your review, you can jump right into answering the questions to obtain your baseline assessment. The questions in your prep materials are carefully formulated to mimic the MCAT questions. This way, you’ll be able to identify how knowledgeable you are before entering medical school.
With the help of these prep materials, you can find your weaknesses in certain subjects. This way, you’ll be prepared for the big examination since you’ll be finding out which sections you need to allot more attention and focus on. Additionally, you can also save more time since you’ll spend less time dealing with well-understood concepts and more time with topics that you lack.
Develop Fruitful Study Habits
Being an aspiring medical student means sacrificing most aspects of your life for studying. Before stepping right into medical school and taking the MCAT, every student gears up and prepares. Since medicine covers an extensively broad amount of material, with various specializations in the different fields of medicine, students should be responsible enough to allocate sufficient time to study these fields.
Prior to taking the MCAT, students will more likely write down their study goals, study with these MCAT prep materials, and eventually develop fruitful study habits that are beneficial not only to their admission examination but also to get them ready into the actual university life.
Hone Critical Thinking
Medicine is a field of study that’s not solely based on books, but its concepts have to be applied to the real-world setting once the student becomes a medical professional. When preparing for your MCAT, with your MCAT prep materials, rest assured that your critical thinking will greatly improve throughout the course. How?
The field of medicine has tremendous terms with different definitions, but the main essence of this is for you to know how you’ll apply medical techniques and discoveries into diagnosing and treating conditions.
Work Under Realistic Conditions
You’ll only experience the real feeling of taking the MCAT once you encounter stress and time pressure. When using your MCAT prep materials for studying, you’ll start familiarizing yourself with the questions that’ll most likely appear in the test. Also, the assessment part in these prep materials is designed to be taken in one sitting, with breaks the same as the actual MCAT, and lasts for 7 hours.
These MCAT prep materials only provide you enough time the same as the MCAT, so you can practice time management prior to the examination. With time pressure, you should be able to finish answering the material to help you familiarize it, which is a great advantage while taking the actual test.
When it comes to stress, you’ll be able to practice dealing with distractions while studying these materials. For instance, you can try to answer a few questions on the prep material inside a noisy cafeteria to control your focus. Also, you can answer worksheets while riding the bus to help you tune out your surroundings.
Reducing stress from studying is almost the same as reducing stress from work, which is essential for your academic improvement.
Learn Self-Evaluation
Aiming for self-improvement will eventually lead you to perform a self-evaluation. If you want to improve academically for your MCAT, then you should be able to assess what you have gained during the whole review.
While diagnostic tests focus on your baseline assessment, which is the basis for comparison of your improvement, the self-evaluation will identify if you’ve reached your study goals.
Once you have the result for your mock examination, compare it with your baseline assessment. Evidently, you’ll see which areas you’ve improved and what you’ve constantly missed.
Conclusion
MCAT prep materials are designed by professionals to prime you for the upcoming big examination. These materials can guide you through a comprehensive process, which involves identifying your weaknesses, writing out your study gameplay, shaping critical thinking, resisting under stress and time pressure, and self-evaluation.
Once you’ve completed these materials, you’ll be more prepared and increase your chances of entering your dream med-school.
