How I got 518+ on the MCAT without paying a fortune

The Medical College Admission Test (MCAT) is a standardized examination that most (if not all) aspiring physicians need to take in order to apply for medical school in the United States. Its content and scope make it difficult for many people regardless of their academic background. For this reason, and given that it can be one of the most significant factors for admission committees, students usually depend on expensive preparation courses. Even though these classes can be helpful due to their rigorous curriculum, it tends to leave candidates who cannot afford these resources at a severe disadvantage. While I couldn’t find research that clearly correlates MCAT scores and Family Income, or at least not as well as we know from the SAT, inequality in these types of application processes is something to consider. That being said, I hope this article can encourage future applicants, especially the ones from underrepresented backgrounds in medicine, to prepare for the MCAT and do well regardless of their capability to afford preparation courses.

Let me preface this article’s title by stating that my goal was just to do well enough to get into an allopathic California school. I ultimately exceeded my own expectations of self-studying with a 518 (130/131/129/128). Had I known all of the details of planning that I outline here, I’m confident my score would’ve been higher (especially in P/S!). The methods I used to get a satisfactory MCAT score are different than what everyone will need, but I hope that some of this is helpful!

The Strategy

Let’s start by talking about preparation courses: I’m sure many of you have considered relying on an expensive prep company, just like I did. Pretty much every member of the premed community that I had met was using Kaplan or Altius. I ended up going to a couple of info sections and getting a “half-scholarship” that tried to justify the still outrageous total of thousands of dollars. If you’re in the same position that I am, that amount of money is pretty unachievable, especially with all of the other expenses that applying to medical school entails. If you can afford a prep company that can cost more than your apps themselves because you need the strict schedule and accountability, then great! If you can’t, apply for AAMC’s Fee Assistance Program and read ahead.

Tackling the MCAT amounts to two problems; mastering the material and learning how to answer the questions. Prep companies are great when it comes to material mastery since they’re very thorough, but a set of Kaplan books or the Khan Academy videos (which are being retired but replaced with something similar) can suffice. If you look on the Facebook Marketplace or Craigslist, you can usually find a set of Princeton or Kaplan books for significantly cheaper than a new set. Problems themselves have a little more selection but just start with the AAMC official materials. You don’t always need to get the bundle. You can get several of the items that are in the bundle at the library for free, and some of the materials you’ll never use. I saved about $100 by only getting the materials that I needed. For me, that was the question packs and 2 of the practice tests. I’ve heard some glowing recommendations for UWorld question packs as well. I ended up getting 10 tests from Altius in addition to the AAMC materials (since they have in-depth explanations of questions) for $150 by signing up for their promotional emails and getting the tests while on sale (they’re on sale pretty frequently). Sign up for emails! Kaplan has daily questions that are helpful, and you can get a lot of free resources by signing up for promotional emails and doing Instagram giveaways. Use what you have!

The bottom line is that the MCAT should somewhat become your life. When you’re not working on homework or working in general, doing problems and content is huge. I personally would highly recommend the MCAT Podcast. I listened to it while driving, folding laundry, working out, you name it.

The Plan

First things first, you need to determine how long you have until you take the MCAT. Do NOT take it until you’re ready. I pushed mine off by 2 weeks because I really needed that extra time. Since my Psych/Soc was pretty weak (I’ve still never taken a Psych class), those 2 weeks of flashcards made all the difference. In general, it’s best to start with taking a diagnostic exam, either full-length or half-length. MCATBros (check out their website, seriously) has links to several free exams, and I took my diagnostic through a free Altius promotion. If you’re within 15–20 points of your target score, 4–6 months part-time should be good. If it’s more than that, consider studying for up to a year. A general rule of thumb is that if you’re scoring over a 500 on your diagnostic, then you should create a plan focused on test strategy. Under 500 should include more content review. However, you should use your judgement; I definitely felt like I needed a ton of content review despite having a fair diagnostic. CREATE A SPREADSHEET. This is the most important thing you can do! You can use a free schedule from AAMC or MCATBros but ultimately you know what you have time or focus for. Here’s a sample of one of my weeks of prep:

I assigned topics and Khan Academy videos for each day leading up until my MCAT, with a Practice Test each week. Rest days are super important, and after each week it’s necessary to re-evaluate whether you’re on target or if you need to focus more heavily on one thing over another. I listed all of my resources to the side and divvied them up throughout the 3 months that I studied. Make sure that you rotate between subjects daily to keep it all fresh in your mind, instead of studying all of Chem/Phys 3 months before the test and forgetting all of it while studying for the other sections. This also helps you avoid burnout. Figure out how you learn best and focus on those resources; if you can learn well by reading, spread out sections of Kaplan books. If you learn better by listening, like me, use the KA videos. Take notes however works best for you; for me, it was noting down everything that I didn’t feel totally confident in/had remembered from uni classes, and organizing that information according to section in order to put it in flashcards.

The last couple of weeks (and I’m not necessarily recommending this for everyone, and it depends heavily on whether or not your score is where you want it to be), I took a full-length, timed practice test every day. Though it was a little (a lot) draining, my score increased 12 points on practice exams in just those couple weeks. On the actual day of the test, my nerves were a mess, I missed 7 minutes of my Bio section because of a bathroom emergency, and I developed a nasty blue light headache from the computer screen during CARS, but taking 10+ full-length practice tests in the preceding weeks with constant distractions helped the real test day to feel routine despite the delays. If nothing else, take the AAMC practice tests and dedicate a couple of days (or just one if you’re at a 510+) to reading through all of the questions and explanations, right or wrong, for each test.

Resources

My favorite resources are the official AAMC materials, Altius tests (which are typically harder than actual AAMC tests), Khan Academy MCAT Prep, Jack Sparrow Anki decks, Kaplan Quicksheets, the MCAT podcast, and MileDown Anki deck. I used Magoosh at the beginning of my prep journey, which helped a lot with laying down basic concepts that I went back and filled in with details. Magoosh pretty frequently gives away a free month of prep through Instagram giveaways, emails, or pop-ups on their blog, which I took advantage of a couple times with the same code. If I could do it over again, though, I would stick with just Khan Academy — their videos are a lot more detailed and targeted to what the AAMC tests, although the accountability and scheduling of Magoosh worked really well for me. I also loved following Instagram MCAT pages, so that even when I was taking a break I’d have MCAT information flowing through my head.

Now that you’ve got some ideas for your schedule, let’s break down the sections:

Chemistry & Physics

Chem/Phys — 59 questions in 95 minutes. Like the MCAT Podcast says, “Breadth, not depth”. You should be familiar with basic concepts, but your knowledge does not need to be insanely deep. Physics questions are usually relatively straightforward if you’re familiar with all of the physics concepts listed. The free questions on Khan Academy are useful in preparation, and Kaplan Quicksheets (online for free) have all of the equations you’ll need to know. I highly recommend practicing taking this section in 90 minutes instead of 95, since it can help you nail down timing. As with this and any other section, my favorite strategy is: work through every question in less than a minute each. If you’re shaky on the concept or it involves calculations, put an answer that seems right and flag it. With repetition, you can nail down timing such that you have half of the time left. With the rest of that time, slowly go through all of your flagged questions. Redo ALL of your calculations. Even if you’re normally really good at math, nerves can make you screw up easy addition/subtraction. Redoing all of my calculations has helped me catch stupid errors on both practice tests and the real deal. When practicing this section, take note of what kinds of questions you normally get wrong and come up with your own strategy to avoid that. If you have time left over, go through the unflagged questions. Keep working right up until the end of the time limit.

TAKE THAT BREAK. All 10 minutes of it. Close your eyes, eat half a protein bar, and definitely do NOT drink a ton of water or you’ll struggle during the Bio section like I did.

Critical Analysis and Reasoning Skills

CARS — This is probably the most difficult and fast-paced section for many people since it’s so difficult to nail down a strategy. You’ll see plenty of targeted ads with poorly constructed memes about their magic CARS strategy. Ignore them. Find what works for you! Here are some ideas that I’ve tried:

• Read through the passage, highlighting important ideas and writing the main idea of each paragraph and the author’s opinions on your whiteboard in shorthand. This can be time consuming but it is very thorough, so it leads to correct (though slow) answers often.
• Read through the passage without reading the questions. Then try to answer each question without looking at the available answers, and select the closest answer to yours. I found this one to be fast but ultimately unreliable as it kept me from noticing qualifiers or tricky phrasing. If you’re a better guesser than I am, though, by all means give this a try.
• Read through the questions and answers before reading through the passage, highlighting key phrases that you remember and evaluate when you get to the questions (I don’t recommend this one as much since it can lead you to fall for trap answers that have similar wordings).
• Skim through just the questions (not the answers) and look for the same main ideas as you read slowly through the passage. Highlight these main ideas and refer back to the passage as you go through questions so that you can focus on qualifying wording. While this can be tedious, I ultimately chose to use this method since it allowed me to compare the question directly to the passage and let me have a looser focus/faster read on the parts of the passage that weren’t applicable to questions.

A handy hint for question skimming would be reading the title (found at the bottom of the passage) before reading through questions so that you get a pretty good sense of the main ideas of each passage. Look for qualifiers like ‘always’ or ‘never’. Eliminate obviously wrong answers and then make quick arguments for each remaining answer with its particular wording. Pick the answer that you feel has the strongest argument and move on. Practicing CARS passages daily will let you become familiar with the wordings that the AAMC uses in distinguishing the correct answer from one that seems correct. Jack Westin has been known to have good, representative daily passages (this was one weak point for Altius tests). Spend 10 minutes max on each passage, but if you can, try to finish within 8 minutes for each-2–3 minutes on reading and about a minute each on the questions. This leaves 15–20 minutes to review flagged questions (do not hesitate to flag!!). Other people have found it to be easier to focus on the easiest passages and skip the hardest passage. For me, skimming each passage to determine difficulty and skipping a hard passage wasn’t ideal for reaching a high CARS score. If you’re struggling with breaking average on CARS, though, this could be a good strategy.

Biology

Bio — Seeing as how we’ve all taken enough Bio classes to impress adcoms, Bio material tends to be pretty quick to cover. If you haven’t taken all of the necessary classes, especially Physiology and Cell Bio, take them the semester before the MCAT or be prepared to study as if you were in a university course. The difficulty in the Bio section lies in the figure analysis. The best focus in preparation centers on reading through MANY scientific articles and explaining them to yourself. The AAMC question banks are also helpful in learning how to read and apply graphs, which you end up seeing a lot of. The pace and strategies should be about the same as the Chem/Phys section.

Psychology & Sociology

Psych/Soc — I won’t pretend I’m an expert with Psych/Soc. Many people do better than I did on my P/S section. If I could go back and do it again, I definitely would spend more time trying to learn Psych instead of ignoring it out of fear as long as I did. My score boosted during practice exams when I started using free Anki flashcard decks like Jack Sparrow or MilesDown. This section is very much a term-focused section. You will want to know exact definitions for many of these terms, as some of the terms can sound applicable to a question without being actually related to the subject in any way. Usually, time isn’t nearly as stressful in this section, as there are no calculations or analyses of figures, so take your time to totally nail this one down.

Improving your Score

Practice Tests! This is where you see how all that prep did in preparing you for the eventual test, so let’s talk general test-taking strategy. Make sure that you are not only taking tests but also building up test-taking stamina. In the 2 weeks leading up to the actual exam, I broke down each test into its sections with long breaks in between, then slowly stuck sections together until I had the stamina to do the whole test at once. I would recommend taking a practice test at least every month of your prep to track that progress. Not taking practice tests throughout prep is like doing research for a PhD and just collecting data up until the night before your thesis defense, when you panic while trying to interpret mountains of data. I highly recommend tracking not only cumulative scores but also individual section scores to see how they fluctuate. I took a screenshot of a couple of my practice tests as an example:

Notice how the PT 1,2, and 3 all have the same cumulative score, but the individual scores change a lot. We see an upward trend in C/P, a downward trend in CARS as I tried different strategies, and variability in Bio and P/S. This tells me that the strategy I’m using for CARS isn’t great for me, and that Bio and P/S likely have knowledge gaps that are exploited in the low section scores. Going through the problems themselves confirmed that, and I worked to at least stabilize those scores (if not improving them). It’s definitely a confidence booster to also have a side column to total your highest scores in each section. This shows you what you CAN do; you just have to work on maintaining those highest section scores.

Reviewing practice tests is where you’re really going to see score improvement. Reviewing isn’t just looking at a test and thinking to yourself, “Oh yeah, that’s why I got that wrong — that’s easy”. This method-just understanding-gets minimal results. Effective practice test review includes going through both right answers and wrong answers. Many tests will let you look at which questions you flagged. Pay special attention to these ones. On these questions, you will want to ask yourself what kind of mistake you made — was it a calculation error? Did you misread the question? Altius has a list of different errors you can have made:

• Did not understand a basic science principle or concept
• Failed to recognize a relationship given in the passage
• Did not recognize a distractor as a violation of basic science
• Marked an answer without careful, unbiased evaluation of all four choices
• Did not paraphrase/restate the question stem
• Short on time; would have answered correctly if I had more time
• Did not understand new information introduced in the passage or stem
• Missed a clue or key piece of information given in the passage or stem
• Did not draw a diagram/structure or write out an equation/expression
• Moved too quickly; would have answered correctly had I slowed down
• Knew the science principle, but was unable to apply it to this circumstance
• Misread, misinterpreted, or did not understand a graph, table or other figure
• Could not accurately perform a basic science skill
• Missed or confused a qualifier
• Misread or misinterpreted the question stem
• Did not recall a fact (definition of term, equation, rote fact)
• Calculation error
• Did not understand the question stem
• Had the correct answer; second-guessed myself and changed it
• Ran out of time completely; had to guess or time expired before I marked an answer
• Did not mark an answer
• Marked the wrong radio button; I intended to mark the correct answer

In determining what the issue is with each wrong problem (and with the right problems you should have gotten wrong), the patterns you see are the errors you need to fix. For example, I got an abnormal amount of calculation errors (which you’re prone to if you get too reliant on calculators — DO NOT use them in preparation for the MCAT). As a result, I automatically flagged all questions with calculations, and redid every calculation with fresh eyes.

Every principle that you get wrong, put on a flashcard. Keep building up your deck of flashcards with these principles, so that you never get them wrong again. On top of all of these suggestions, don’t be afraid to see what works for you. Experiment with strategies you’ve used in your past university courses.

Ultimately…

The MCAT is not the only thing that will strengthen your application, but with some work, it can become one of its main strengths. The test itself is great preparation in figuring out how you learn best for the kind of work and study that you’re going to have to do as a medical student.

You can nail this! Play around with what works for you. Give yourself a couple of extra weeks in anticipation of having to backtrack and try different methods. And most of all, stay confident!

Good luck!