the opportunity to attend medical school and become a doctor. With this weight comes a

great deal of myths and misconceptions that continue to be perpetuated today. Here's what

I wish someone had told me about the MCAT. Dr. Jubbal, MedSchoolInsiders.com.

Most students believe that more studying will result in more knowledge and therefore a better

score, but that isn't always the case. I've seen countless students plateau with their

score despite spending several additional months dedicated to MCAT studying.

The reason is that while you can learn and retain information at a certain rate, you'll

also forget information at a certain rate. There are certain tools and strategies that

you can use to increase the rate of learning and decrease the rate of forgetting, but the

fact remains that at a certain point you will plateau with your score.

It's for this reason that I find the best results from my tutoring clients when they

are able to dedicate a few months of full time, high intensity studying to the MCAT.

This will maximize information acquisition and retention and minimize forgetting learned

information. In most cases, 3 months of high-intensity dedicated MCAT studying will beat out 6 months

of medium-intensity studying while taking other college courses. In fact, I've seen

this play out time and time again. Certain students will take 6 months, 12 months, and

sometimes even longer preparing for the MCAT, but their score is usually worse than those

who remained focused at high intensity for shorter periods.

There is no perfect time to take the MCAT, but the best time for most students is the

end of summer. By taking the MCAT around September, you have the entire summer to dedicate fully

to the test. That means at least 12 weeks, and sometimes more, to throw yourself at MCAT

prep, day in and day out. By eliminating distractions and remaining focused, this time is often

the best shot you have at achieving your score potential.

There are downsides to this approach. If you are applying during that medical school application

cycle that begins in June, then you'll be far behind the curve to be taking your MCAT

in September. By the time your score is released and application is fully processed, it will

be October and you'll be at a substantial disadvantage in your medical school application.

For this reason, taking the MCAT at the end of summer only makes sense if you are applying

in a future medical school application cycle. For example, if you are going to take a year

off between college and medical school, then you'll need to apply to medical school at

the end of your senior year, right as you graduate. In this instance, you may want to

take the MCAT the prior September. This will give you enough time to also ensure all of

your prerequisite courses are complete too, which is helpful for the MCAT.

If you are not taking a year off between college and medical school, it's a bit trickier to

navigate. You'll need to apply to medical school at the end of your junior year, during

the summer before your senior year. You should still take the MCAT the prior September, meaning

you would be studying during the summer after your sophomore year. But this raises a potential

issue; most students will not have taken all of their medical school prerequisite courses

after just two years of college. I took the MCAT at this time, without having taken my

biochemistry course, and instead studied biochemistry from my MCAT prep materials. I ended up scoring

strongly, and missing that course didn't hold me back.

However, this isn't best for everyone, and will ultimately be a personal decision based

on two primary factors: (1) the subject in question and (2) your strengths and weaknesses.

Certain sections like psychology and sociology are more memorization heavy on the MCAT, and

many students are able to self-study without taking the corresponding college course. Other

subjects, like physics, may be more limiting on the MCAT without having taken the prerequisite

classes. Second, you need to be honest with yourself

as to how you self-study. If you are a stronger student, or you feel you can learn and grasp

concepts learning from a textbook without an instructor, you may not need to take the

prerequisite course. But if you are struggling with certain subjects or find it difficult

to self-study, it may be best to first take the corresponding class.

Successfully studying for and tackling the MCAT is one of those instances where it pays

dividends to develop an intelligent plan of attack and stick to it. Worrying about what

others are doing and deviating from your plan will more often than not hold you back. You

may be curious how your fellow classmate or friend is studying. Which resources are they

using? How many months are they studying for? How many hours per day? How many practice

tests? These are important decisions to make prior

to beginning your MCAT prep. The issue in changing them midway is your plan will be

compromised, as you're making adjustments guided by emotion and FOMO, not from a calm

place of logic and centeredness. This plays out in a several different ways.

One is the student who fears they aren't using the latest and greatest resource, and tacks

on more resources than they can handle. Getting halfway through half a dozen resources is

not going to provide you with a better score compared to focusing on just a couple that

are high quality. Remember, you don't have to know every single insignificant fact to

get a top score on the MCAT. Part of your score is based on your knowledge, and part

of your score is based on your ability to apply knowledge and reason your way to the

best answer choice. This leads us to another common mistake, which

is focusing too heavily on content review and not enough on practice questions and practice

tests. I've made a separate video on how to best approach practice questions and practice

tests, link in the description. Remember that they aren't just a good tool to practice test

taking strategies and application techniques, but with proper review, they are also powerful

learning tools – that's right, you can learn and consolidate important information through

practice questions, not just through content review resources.

A big part of sticking to the plan comes down to accountability. It's natural to deviate

slightly from your MCAT plan, but you want to minimize that deviation. Accountability

is a powerful tool to keep you on track. If you are studying with your friends, you

can be each others' accountability buddies. I even encourage some friendly competition,

so long as you can make sure its friendly and serves everyone. For some, competition

may lead to toxicity. Accountability can also come in the form of

a tutor, who can not only craft a custom tailored MCAT study plan, but also hold you accountable

to that plan and help you overcome any issues or challenges with concepts, test taking strategies,

and even test taking anxiety. You can learn about our industry leading MCAT tutoring on

medschoolinsiders.com. Last, understand the value of your time and

opportunity cost to spending it in suboptimal ways. I was so obsessed with optimizing my

time during my MCAT prep that for the last 4 weeks leading up to my test, I went back

home to my mom's place and studied there. After all, I would save time not having to

prepare my own food or do my own laundry or buy my own groceries. I could truly dedicate

myself fully to the MCAT, day in and day out. I see students wasting precious MCAT study

time in a variety of ways, most notably using poor study strategies that rely on passive

techniques over far more effective active ones. Reading and highlighting in your content

review book or watching videos passively are not good uses of your time. It's far better

to practice active learning strategies, such as spaced repetition with active recall, practice

questions, or even synthesis questions that I cover in my evidence based study strategy

video. When it comes to spaced repetition with active

recall, the best way to implement this is through flashcards. But even with flashcards,

there's the good, bad, and the ugly. Making your own flashcards is an active learning

strategy, and you will learn by doing so, but there are three problems with this.

First, spending 60 minutes making flashcards won't teach you as much as going through and

studying high quality flashcards instead. Second, the overwhelming majority of students

don't make good flashcards. Despite using flashcards for medical school and residency,

it was only after continuing to refine and practice my own flashcard creation strategy

in the last couple years that I realized where the deficiencies were and how subtle and nuanced

the best flashcards are. And third, to create the best flashcards on

a given subject, you need to have mastery of the subject at hand. You must understand

related concepts that contrast with the topic, whether that concept is high-, medium-, or

low-yield, and how the concept is tested on the MCAT. As a premed studying for the MCAT,

by definition you don't have mastery of the subjects, otherwise you wouldn't be studying

for the test. Memm is the answer to these problems. Through

Memm, we've developed a better way to use flashcards and review sheets to accelerate

MCAT learning. The average Memm user scores a 514.3 on test day, which is a 90th percentile

score. And we've had countless students write to us who have tried alternatives, like Anki,

but found it clunky and they thought flashcards just weren't for them. But once they tried

Memm, things just fell into place and their scores started improving. I've linked some

interviews with our users down in the description so you can hear their stories first hand.

You can sign up for Memm with a 7 day free trial, or use the coupon code WISH21 for 10%

off your subscription. If you enjoyed this video, check out my MCAT

playlist for more MCAT study tips and strategies. Much love, and I'll see you guys there.