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The Navigate MCAT 520+ Study Guide

Contents

Intro

My name is Nick, I am a non-traditional MCAT tutor, and this is my comprehensive study guide. This is based on the method I used to self-teach almost every subject and score a 522 (99th percentile) in January 2024, with additions based on tutoring dozens of students to improve their test scores.

The MCAT is not a normal test, it has a unique format which won’t be familiar to most students. While it's multiple choice, you won't able to get a good score if you study the same way you did for undergraduate courses. The majority of questions are passage based meaning you will have to apply your knowledge to any number of different situations, and have a deep enough understanding of them to recognize this.

MCAT studying is broken down into two parts: content review and full-length practice.

Content Review

The content-review phase of your MCAT studying is when you learn and reinforce your understanding if the science subjects tested on the MCAT. During this phase, you should focus on grasping overall concepts using review books and online resources, rather than full memorization of every term you might need to know. This phase lays the groundwork for your later practice and application efforts.

Full-Length Practice Testing

The full-length testing phase of your MCAT preparation involves taking complete, timed practice exams that simulate the actual test environment. During this phase, you should treat each practice test as if it were the real exam, adhering strictly to the timing and conditions to build your endurance and test-taking skills. After completing each test, spend significant time analyzing your results to identify strengths and weaknesses. Focus on understanding why you missed questions and review both correct and incorrect answers to reinforce your knowledge. You should only start this phase after initial content review, and this phase is where you will see the most improvement on scores.

How Long To Prep For The MCAT

As with most questions, the answer is: it depends. The main factors in figuring this out are your previous exposure (and mastery) of MCAT subjects, and the amount of time you’re willing to commit to studying per week. For example, I studied for about 6-months on a part-time basis since I had to learn most subjects for the first time. Someone in 4th year biology undergrad might have much more exposure to the content, and could prep in half the time or less.

A high-level time estimate that I like to give is: 3 months for content review, and 2 months for full-length practice. These will change based on the factors I brought up before, and will depend on your discipline and focus. At the end of the day, you want to make sure that you have at least been exposed to every high-yield concept before starting to do full-lengths. You DO NOT have to memorize everything within these concepts, but should have a good handle on super high-yield things like amino acids (we will go over high-yield soon).

Make sure you complete these before your test date, they will be the greatest source of score improvement by far:

  1. ALL AAMC full-length practice tests (6 total)
  2. ALL AAMC Section Bank questions (2 packs of questions)
  3. ALL AAMC CARS Question Packs (2 packs of questions).

These are paid resources, but if you’re willing to pay for any study materials, this should be it.

Resources To Use For Content Review

There are so many different resources out there that it can be pretty overwhelming to even start studying. I don’t believe that any one resource is going to prepare someone for this test, and everyone has a different style of learning which matches better with some resources than others. I will give my overall recommendations, and link to a resources list from you to test out for yourself.

Textbooks

Overall, I recommend that everyone get their hands on a good set of textbooks (online or otherwise) to use as the main way to guide their content review. These books don’t have 100% of the information tested on the MCAT, but they will go over the high-yield concepts.

Based on my experience and student sentiment, I recommend Kaplan books. Some prefer Princeton Review so look into each.

With a textbook set, I also recommend that you do not use the CARS and Behavioural Sciences books, as other resources will be more helpful in learning these.

Other Resources

The internet is a wonderful place for finding specific information about the test, and you should use it to fill in gaps in your knowledge. Like I mentioned earlier, you should treat the AAMC practice material as gold, and make sure you prioritize finishing these before your test. There are great video learning resources through YouTube, free practice questions on sites like JackWestin🔗, and I found that most AAMC practice questions had a Reddit post explaining an answer.

If you’re interested in a list of resources that I recommend for content review and practice questions, click the button below.

See All Resources

Order Of Learning Subjects

If you’re learning these subjects for the first time, or haven’t studied them in a long time, I recommend learning each subject sequentially, instead of interleaving different subjects at the same time (ex. Physics monday, chem tuesday, etc.). If you’re in undergrad and studied all these courses recently then do whatever order you’d like.

For those going in sequence, I only recommend a specific order for these subjects because they build on each other, culminating in biochemistry:

Biology / Chemistry -> Organic Chemistry -> Biochemistry

Physics, psychology, and sociology can be learned any time in your content review phase.

Content Review Strategy

Don't just memorize. I cannot stress this enough. You can have every single definition required for this test memorized, but if you don't have deeper understanding of the concepts they define, you will not score well.

What this means in practice is that as you go through textbooks and other content resources, your goal should be to understand chapter headings and bolded words on a deeper level, rather than memorizing very specific and detailed parts of those chapters. For example, in learning Newton's laws some students commit the actual wording to memory:

"Newton's Second Law: An object of mass m will accelerate when the vector sum of the forces results in some nonzero resultant force vector".

But what you really want to understand is the deeper meaning. Newton's second law just means that if I push on something in a certain direction it will move in that direction, and heavy things are hard to push. This is very intuitive and easy to understand, but some students apply needless complexity to these definitions when they could be explained simply if they have understanding. If you can simplify or teach a concept, you will understand it better. For your initial content review, you want to be able to paraphrase broad concepts instead of memorizing detailed information.

Here's another example:

P1V1 = P2V2 is Boyle's Law

In studying ideal gases there are multiple equations with different names of this sort. Many students memorize these equations, only to get them mixed up with eachother on test day. Instead, try understanding why they make sense in the world.

I intuitively understand that when I squeeze a football, it will get smaller. This is exactly what Boyle's Law describes. If you can connect concepts to the real world like this, you will do much better on test day. Make this your aim for initial content review, worry about the equations and detail later.

Chemistry & Physics: Math Skills

Math on the CP section can be daunting, especially since calculators aren't allowed during the test. But the reality is that 90% of the math on the MCAT is just addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, with some algebra mixed in. Get good at the following to make the math as simple as possible:

Heavily Rounding

Most math questions on the test have answer choices which are different enough that rounding won't affect your choice. For example:

17.22 / 4.33 can be rounded to 20 / 5 = 4 (real answer: 3.977)

384.8 * 24.3 can be rounded to 400 * 20 = 8000 (real answer: 9350.64)

Don't be afraid to round, it's probably close enough.

Unit Analysis

If a question asks you to calculate the k_cat of an enzyme using passage data, some students will completely skip the question if they can't recall the k_cat equation. But the answer choices will all be in s^-1, which means you just have to find values in the passage which can be multiplied or divided to get those units.

So I need something that makes [s^-1] or [1/s].

I find a value of 25 M/s, and another of 5 M.

I divide (25 M/s) / (5 M) and get 5 s^-1.

If you have studied enzyme kinetics, you'll know that we just used a form of the k_cat equation, but you could reasonably answer questions like this without having any background knowledge at all, as long as you understand the units involved.

Biology & Biochemistry: Reading Graphs and Tables

A large portion of questions in the BB section (and some in others) will be related to reading graphs and making conclusions about the data presented in them. This isn't something that books teach super well, and takes practice.

If this is a skill that you aren't good at, I would recommend going through some medical journals to read any interesting research papers with graphs in them. In these, they will present the data, and usually have a section explaining the results and their conclusions about the data. You should try to make these conclusions yourself before checking their explanation. This mimics the skills you'll be using on the actual test.

Psychology & Sociology: Flash Card Decks

Flash cards are a great resource for committing lots of MCAT knowledge to memory. I would advise against learning every subject using Anki, but I find that the PS section is the one exception to this.

Psychology and Sociology on the MCAT is heavily definition based, meaning you can get by with memorizing terms rather than having a deep understanding of it (because there isn't much of a deeper understanding of a lot of these definitions).

Before using Anki, however, I would recommend reading through an abridged PS notes document. There are a few popular ones like the 86 page and 300 page documents, which you can find in the resources page🔗.

CARS: Building Strategy Using Third-Party Passages

Third-party CARS will never be as helpful as AAMC CARS passages, they just aren't written to the same level of quality, and questions are answered with different logic for every third-party provider. However, third-party CARS passages are great ways to practice reading comprehension, timing, and strategy for this section. These are the things you should be focusing on before you start doing AAMC passages.

You might notice during this time that you get really good at JackWestin CARS passages for example, but when you try to do AAMC passages your accuracy drops heavily. This is normal. After practicing enough, you begin to understand how a specific company, like JackWestin, writes CARS questions and answers. For this reason, once you start doing AAMC practice tests, you should stop doing third-party CARS passages completely, and start doing AAMC CARS question packs as practice. You should only be doing AAMC leading up to your test to train your brain in how the AAMC writes questions and answers.

Practice Tests: Overview

At this point, you should have a high-level understanding of each MCAT subject, not necessarily enough knowledge to answer every question you see, but enough to know what content is being tested for every question. For example, if a question is asking you about the structure of sucrose and how it bonds with other saccharides, you should understand that you are being tested on sugar/carbohydrate organic chemistry.

Full-length tests (FLs) will be your main source of practice questions as you prep for the MCAT. Ideally you will complete these practice tests in simulated testing conditions: one sitting, no distractions, and with time pressure. This will not only train you to understand the content and questions that is tested, but also help you understand the strategy needed to write the test well.

How many FLs? What order? How often?

These questions will depend on how much time you have, but generally follow these guidelines:

For a list of third-party FLs, see the resources page🔗.

How To Review Practice Tests

Reviewing practice tests and questions is where you will gain the majority of score improvement, so do this well. You need to take this step seriously, and if you ever get a question wrong (or guess a correct answer), your goal is to never get a similar question wrong again.

Here is an overview of what you'll be doing during review:

  1. Go through every question in the test, and stop once you've reached an incorrect question or one where you guessed the correct answer (guessing means you didn't know how to answer it)
  2. Think back to what was going through your mind when you answered the question wrong (or guessed)
  3. Address the issue. If it was a content gap, review that content immediately. If you didn't understand the passage, read it again for understanding, then re-answer the question. If you find a pattern in the types of questions you get wrong, you may need to adjust your passage strategy.
  4. Keep track of why you are answering questions wrong, and work on improving this between FLs.

Again, ideally you want to review FLs the day after you write them, which helps with Step 2.

CARS: How To Improve Before Test Day

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