Have you ever been in a study group where everyone's struggling with a difficult problem, and this kid does it in a few seconds? Then everyone goes hey, how did you do that? The kid explains it, and you thought wow, that's pretty neat, why haven't I thought of that before?
Cracking the MCAT is no different. It's all about
ideas,
tricks,
shortcuts. For example:
- Some questions are inherently easy to crack. Consider a really difficult chemical redox equation that you are asked to balance. Normally, it may take you well over a minute to do it, separating out the half reactions, balancing charge, atoms, recombining the half reactions, add back spectator ions... etc. But what's to prevent you from simply looking at the answer choices and pick out the right answer in just a few seconds? After all, there's only 4 choices. All you have to do is to check for each one to see if their atoms, charge are all balanced.
- To handle other questions, you need to not make careless mistakes. Imagine that the MCAT is a field you have to cross that is filled with well-hidden traps and pits. If you charge recklessly through, you are probably going to fall in one. However, if you crawl through it, cautious of every step, then you won't finish on time. But what if you knew ahead of time exactly where the traps are placed? One such trap in the MCAT is the molecular weight of oxygen in stoichiometry. An oxygen atom in a compound has a MW of 16, but for everything else oxygen will have a MW of 32 because it exist as a diatomic. However, the MCAT will not warn you in flashing letters this is so. In fact the MCAT will do the opposite: one of the answer choices will be the wrong answer you get from using 16 as the MW of molecular oxygen.
- Some other questions requires you not fall prey to common misconceptions. One misconception involves the equilibrium constant Keq. The equilibrium constant lets you know where the reaction will be at equilibrium, but not how fast it will get there. Therefore a reaction with a Keq = 1x1043 does not necessarily proceed faster than a reaction with a Keq = 1 x 103, unlike what many people would intuitively guess.
There are always tricks/hacks to doing things a better way. While there are numerous tricks and mnemonics to the countless different topics and concepts on the MCAT, a few are used over and over again by the most seasoned test-takers.
We include four test-proven strategies that separates a seasoned test-taker from a novice in our MCAT Outlines book and pdf to give you an advantage on the test.
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