[00:09] Torah: Welcome listeners to the Prep Me podcast. A podcast about this wonderful world we call medicine. And most of all, how to get you into that lab coat. You’re hearing your usual pre-med guides. I am Torah and this is Chansey.

[00:22] Chansey: Hello everybody.

[00:23] Torah: And we are the host of the show. So you want to know who else is getting you into that white lab coat? Prep 101, our sponsor, which provides the best MCAT prep, test prep service out there, personalized study guides, expert instructors, and the most practice materials you could ever want. Check them out at Prep101.com/mcat for all and I mean all your test prep needs. So today on the show, I think Chansey, you’re going to burst my bubble a little bit here because I think the psych and soc section of the MCAT is the easiest. I mean, I have that impression. I think a lot of us do and we’re wrong, right?

[01:05] Chansey: I think you can be wrong only because Soc is the new kid on the block. Some people will be like the fluffiest material, the very much, you know the definition, you got the answer and we get stopped on the test. That is the test takers and the students get stooped and we’re over confident, we go in and we’re like, there was only one question about Pavlos dog experiment and everything else was papers on things. I don’t know what they were talking about. They were talking about the concept of a new format of retention and studying for tests like the MCAT. I didn’t read about that. I stumbled my way through it and spent 15 minutes on a passage. Huge red flags. 

[01:44] We don’t want that, but I think that’s what happens. People underestimate and they go and they write and they’re shocked with how it really wasn’t what they studied per se. It’s like the one section where you study and it feels the best, but then you go to the section, you’re like, oh, they really didn’t test the way I thought they were going to test.

[01:59] Torah: So is it somehow, would you call it in between the bio, the CARS, like somewhere in between where it’s like about test taking, But you also have to know the big words behind that.

[02:09] 100%, that’s actually an elegant way to say it. I would say it does fit perfectly sort of between bio and CARS because you feel that time crunch, there’s a bit of reading to it. A lot of the experiments won’t solely be graphs and numbers. There’s going to be discussions, sort of clippings from papers that are going to be there and you need to appraise and interpret. And then certainly employ your foundation of all the definitions and the terms and the baseline experiments that you learn for psychosocial. But you have so much more to apply because it’s CARS like in the sense that there’s lots of experiments that are popping up there that you would not have had to study or think about interpreting in your prep work.

[02:45] Torah: Okay, so with bio I find some of the hardest questions are interpreting the scientific method. So it’s like, okay, well which control were the researchers missing? And that’s always a difficult one. Psych soc is just that, a lot more, like a lot more scientific method questions. Are they just as hard as the ones that I find in bio?

[03:07] Chansey: I think easily just as hard if not more convoluted because they’re certainly going to dive into the scientific method. They’re going to dive into the definition of a control of a confounder. Like they’re going to test the research method and hypotheses just as much as the bio section, but they’re going to stay within their lane of psych soc, in terms of the topics. Because psych soc, like bio, just so you can say okay, I need to know cardio, I need to know glycolysis, I need to know. Psych soc isn’t just psych soc. You’re going to have topics that, I’m just trying to think about the test itself, that you’re going to have. You’re going to learn about dreams, you’re going to learn about development, you’re going to learn about stress and emotional regulation, memory learning. 

[03:49] Torah: Those are huge topics.

[03:50] Chansey: They’re huge, right? And there are so many studies within those of what you’re going to learn from your baseline and you’re studying from like exam progress, which we hope you use. It is the best book or any book that you use, you’re going to learn those baseline experiments. But they’re huge topics. You’re never going to be able to know all of them. But you need to be able to appreciate the basics so that hopefully you’ve mapped out an approach to handle these kinds of big honking, intimidating passages.

[04:16] Torah: So I was at a sub once, one of the psych soc instructor got sick. So they’re like, Torah, can you teach the first lecture of psych soc? And I was like, I look through the material, I’m like, I can, it was mostly psych. I do have some courses under my belt and psych and I’m like, I did and I taught it and it was at least the first lecture and I haven’t done the rest of the course. So I’m not necessarily one to speak expertly about it. A lot of definitions, but the concepts weren’t as hard.

[04:50] Chansey: No, not like, not when you’re studying anyway. 

[04:52] Torah: Not with the nephron.

[04:55] Chansey: No, for sure. I’ll give you that.

[04:58] Torah: Like I hate, well you know this. I hate the kidney. I mean I’m learning to love it but I hate the kidney. That’s stupid nephron. But yeah, that’s hard. Like it’s genuinely hard in any way you look at it. But some of the psych subjects, I was like it’s complicated but I know I can understand if I put the time in.

[05:16] Chansey: That’s it, is if you put the time in and you can read it all, there are very few moments of psych soc, when you’re like, oh gosh, I don’t get that, I’m going to have to read that 10 more times to get it. No, if you read it at an active kind of reading pace and write down your notes, you’re going to get it. I’m thinking of memory, like I’m even just pulling up my notes now when I was teaching psych soc, like memory, like it’s tough to teach psych soc, because it’s so much of, here’s this term, know these definitions. So I spend most of my time giving you examples of these models, like examples of what is, like in learning, what is observational learning versus classical conditioning and what’s a real world example of that because the MCAT’s going to appreciate or expect you, I should say, to read a passage.

[05:53] And if they ask you, what type of learning’s going on here, you need to be able to identify it without using the very characteristic experiment of dog bell food. Which is what we always use when we think about classical conditioning. I want to give you more examples and sort of broaden your catalog so that you recognize when, oh this experiment indeed is classical conditioning or you know what, this isn’t classical conditioning, this is more operant conditioning. You need to be able to pull those out. You might have understood them crystal clear in the MCAT prep course or in your own studying. But then when I throw this really convoluted scenario, it may not be as clear to say, oh is that operate or is that classical or did it start as classical but then evolve to operate? There’s going to be so many answer combinations and that’s what makes it a pain in the butt.

[06:34] Torah: Is it underestimated?

[06:36] Chansey: I would say by most people, unless you’re the psych soc major, I think you respect your field and respect that you’re like, no, this needs time and I still need to practice. But it’s me. It’s like the bio major who thinks I’ve done a psych course, I’ve done an course and a soc course. I should be pretty well enough to do this. Wrote the new section. I was like, okay, not quite enough. Not quite as innate as I want it to be. So I still needed to practice it just like CARS, just in terms of like the style of questioning and the way they would pull information from me because it’s not as expected.

[07:06] Torah: So that’s my next question, actually is that, did you study more like CARS or did you study more like bio?

[07:15] Chansey: I don’t think I could say I studied more like cars in terms of the strategies because it’s such a unique, as you know as the master, CARS is so unique in terms of how we break down passages and break down the author, the idea and they sort of predict the questions to come with psych soc I found that like I studied like bio because there was just a lot of memorization in terms of the baseline experiments, the baseline definitions, the progression through development, memory, all the topics. But I still needed to practice so many psych sections just to see how they would test me. I think the way they test you in bio is a bit more predictable than the way they test you in the psych so. 

[07:51] Torah: Bio is so predictable.

[07:52] Chansey: You get it, if you put the time in to any section psych soc in particular, you get it. I just didn’t think I’d have to put that time in and I thought it would be very hard to study this, oh there’s the answer, study that, oh that’s clearly the answer. And it wasn’t a directive, a tether that I appreciated it to be.

[08:08] Torah: Was psych soc your weakest science, like the first time you took the exam?

[08:16] Chansey: Hey this is not the forum for that. Yeah, yeah folks CARS weren’t great. Hey you know what? CARS got good. 

[08:23] Torah: Because you just have to practice.

[08:25] Chansey: But you know what? For all of my, I think it was usually a tie sort of between chem, physics and psych soc. But it started with psych soc being the weakest of the sciences and from the very things we just talked about, it was my underestimation and what I needed to put in for study time and practice time that bumped it back up and put it on par with like a 127, 128 we’ll say compared to the chem and the physics. But it wasn’t as quick, like I think I alarmed myself by being like, what the heck? Why are you doing so poorly? It’s like, SOC, what’s the disconnect here? And I think it was a combination of the language and I keep using the word convoluted because it’s basic studying items and studying terms and knowledge. But it’s so convoluted the way they have question stems. The question stems from always joking about which of the following is least likely to be false? It’s the wording around it that gets you. So that is certainly prevalent in psych and soc.

[09:19] Torah: And the first, when the first three lines of the question stem, if you deleted them, it wouldn’t change the question at all. And you get so lost in trying to decipher the first little chunk of information that they give you that you don’t realize until you start reading the answers that it was irrelevant. 

[09:34] Chansey: It’s like CARS that way for psychosocial, they have these big stems and they talk about, like they recap the whole experiment and you think your question is going to be summarize the experiment and they start by saying, in this experiment, so and so prove that this and the summary was that. They’re like, oh shoot, what’s the question then, you just gave me all the information and then they get to the question afterwards, which is a bit more tricky?

[09:53] Torah: So in terms of studying for it, so do you write out your definitions, do you do your practice. You’ve taught now for prep 101 and again reminded that of course Prep 101 is our sponsor and we have worked for them in the past and sometimes still do. But we’re not biased in that way. Do you think that the psych soc section of prep 101 is comprehensive enough for the exam? I’m really putting Prep 101 on the spot here. But look, they don’t really listen to us. 

[10:23] Chansey: No 100%  because you have to think of like this too. I’ve had the unique platform that I was teaching the material but then also studying it at the same time because when I wrote the MCAT, the last one was the new MCAT. It was the new Beast, the 2015 Beast of an MCAT. So I had not written a psych soc in a real full length exam other than the practices that we do as instructors. So I was teaching and I was studying and I was using prep 101 materials. So I’m biased that way, but I loved it. Like I felt so much more confident being able to, like I was teaching it, I was studying it before I taught it. So it clicked. I think one of Prep 101’s strongest classroom companions. One of the like what was actually psych soc because yes it’s a lot of definitions but there’s so much space in the margins to give examples and that’s how psych soc worked. 

[11:10] It was teaching examples and learning more examples in my own studying, because you do not want to be sort of in the corner of a room stuck with your one example so that you can’t recognize patterns in psychological methods or study design and all that. That’s psych, right? 

[11:25] Torah: It’s so much application.

[11:26] Chansey: Understand the results and figure out the conclusion or where the next directions are going to be. Like you are the scientist in psych soc.

[11:33] Torah: How much statistics is on that exam?

[11:39] Chansey: I wouldn’t say there’s much more than bio. But I’ve also written some psych soc where I thought this is a lot of stats. Like I don’t think I’ve written a version that had this much. So you certainly see some degree of a little bit more tilted with some statistically heavy analysis versus less. But you’re going to see a lot of the same basis as it relates to ir, even bio, like you’re going to get your basic high squares, your cap and myers. You’re going to understand your standard error of the means, those still pop up. You’re still going to have to understand. 

[12:06] Torah: I don’t really understand any of those. No, I know about high squared because I’m a geneticist. What’s the second one he said? What is that?

[12:13] Chansey: Cap and Myers curve. It’s like a mortality curve or a negative effective curve that over time if someone is exposed to a certain thing. How does it negatively impact them? 

[12:23] Torah: Like a death curve. 

[12:24] Chansey: Yeah, exactly. The most alternate example is like a death curve. Like over time how many people die off to a certain condition or medical disease, et cetera, et cetera.

[12:32] Torah: I’ve never heard it called that. And so stats is in a way like organic chemistry, is to the organic chemistry sector or the chem section and bio. Some tests you’ll see a lot of organic chemistry and it’s hard. Some tests maybe not as much, as kind of the same with stats. There’s not anything predictable. It’s 10% of the exam or 5% of that section or whatever. It kind of varies.

[12:57] Chansey: Yeah, I think so. And if you have to put numbers on it, it’s probably like 5 to 15%. I’d say that’s my guesstimate. I don’t know for sure but I certainly remember just doing, I probably did 20 to 30 psych soc sections in my prep for the MCAT. And of the 20 to 30 I would say it was on the lighter side than the heavier side of stats. But then my real length MCAT, I remember it, it was more stats heavy. So it just goes to show you can’t really predict it but prepare for it. Good courses and good study materials are going to walk you through the basics to MCAT stats and math and you shouldn’t brush it off. You shouldn’t think like, oh I’ve heard it’s basic. I heard I don’t even need a calculator, I’ll be fine. No, if you haven’t done stats or it’s been a little bit of time you need to review that because it’s just easy points, right?

[13:37] Torah: Now when it comes to doing. So we’ve got psych soc. What courses in university does it cover? Is it your typical first year one single psych course? Second first one course of soc or more?

[13:56] Chansey: I’d say so. I’d say it’s that and you probably still have a bit of overkill by doing the full year of psych. It’s really like in many universities and I haven’t attended all of them because that would be impossible. But thinking back to my intro psych the first semester and then probably my first or only semester of sociology was a good sort of baseline. There are still more specific details that even on the MCAT that come up that you didn’t learn in class. And then on the other side, there are many, many other topics that you learn in class that will never pop up on the MCAT because there’s just no time. Or at least when you think about the AMC and the way they organize the section of psych soc, they’ve got pretty clear objectives, which is kind of nice.

[14:33] It’s not like, I mean bio has it, but there’s so much more biomaterial it’s a bit more of a gamble. With psych soc it’s so predictable what you’re going to see. Like you will always have language and cognition, you will always have something in memory. You will always have something on society and culture or like social inequalities. Like they’re always there. So you feel a bit more confident going into the section if you put your time in those areas. Rather like in bio you and I know like you could study immunology because it was the hardest part for you and then not see immunology on your MCAT and be like, oh, what a bummer. I’ve worked so hard on that and it didn’t even pop up.

[15:06] Torah: Okay that’s good. Okay. So predictable in a way. First year of course. Did I ever tell you, I think I’ve told you this. I think one of the reasons why I think historically have underestimated psych and soc, and I’m going to stop doing that is because. So my first year, you know my first year wasn’t particularly stellar as a student. 

[15:24] Chansey: Echo that.

[15:25] Torah: Yeah, not so good. And I went to my first psych class and the prof said it was really boring, but he said, oh, if you do better on the final than you do in your midterms, I’ll take that final mark as your total grade. I was like, Yeah, see ya. I did not go to class, zero, didn’t write any midterms, didn’t know anything that was done. And I went and I was like, oh, I guess I have a final. And I sat the final without having a textbook, nothing. I got an A.

[15:55] Chansey: I’m so stressed hearing this, I’m so stressed during this and I hate you so much for that. I’m stressed hearing it and I hate you.

[16:01] Torah: No, because back in the day we had to actually check our grades on paper. Like your unofficial grades were like a paper thing posted to your prof store. And I went there and I found my ID and I lined across my finger and I was like, no I can’t be it. And I closed the paper, then I walked away. I was like, I must have the wrong room. I clearly could not have cold called an A and then I went back and I walked and then walked back and then like checked it again and there’s my ID. I checked my ID number. I was like, maybe I got my ID wrong. No, no, no. I got an A.

[16:35] Chansey: So this is another episode of how Torah broke the academic system.

[16:39] Torah: Yeah, exactly. And then the rest of my academic career, I studied my absolute butt off. But anyways, every other A I had to earn, but that was an hilarious one. So I feel like that is why I’ve looked at psych and soc. I did do like a psych class in high school, so I think that kind of primed me to just have that foundation.

[16:59] Chansey: Well obviously something stuck. You remembered some aspect or you’re just exceptionally good at multiple choice if that was your exam. 

[17:06] Torah: Yeah, it was all multiple choice. 

[17:06] Chansey: Very common sense. You know what a good point about the psych soc though I have to say, is I think as being like an instructor and being someone who’s doing grad school and then running the lab and then I’m sure you can relate from like being a professor and teaching this type of content, studying psych soc was actually kind of refreshing because it was interesting. I thought it was sort of neat. I liked the manipulation of people and experiments. I like the interpretation of how we grow and develop and how you really find your opinion in the matter as to how you think like nature versus nurture and the value of observational learning versus something like classical conditioning that we talked about earlier. 

[17:44] How they sway depending on who you are and how you’re raised and the experiences you have. It’s super refreshing as someone who just spent hours and hours doing bio or hours and hours practicing curves to come and just read psych and be like, yeah it comes easy. It makes sense. And that’s an interesting experiment. So I think that was nice.

[18:02] Torah: Do you remember more from psych than you do say the biochemistry, like the enzyme kinetics because it resonated?

[18:10] Chansey: At the time a hundred percent. Like going into the exam a hundred percent. Or even just like chem organic. It stuck because I found it kind of like CARS. You said it many times and in the last time we talked about CARS is like you have to approach every section or every passage like you’re excited by it. Like it’s the best thing and the most thrilling topic in the world. And I found that I was doing that more naturally with psych. I was just interested in it. So it stuck.

[18:33] Torah: So find interest, I mean that’s true for all passages, but maybe psych soc it’s easier to do.

[18:39] Chansey: Yeah, a hundred percent. And the thing is, you’re still going to see things that are predictable and studies you’ve heard about forever, like the classical pow logs dog or talking about, theorem. Like you’re going to see all this basic stuff that you’ve been learning about probably since high school, but there’ll be some more in depth topics that maybe you haven’t spent so much time talking about, especially as it relates to social demographics, inequalities, and culture, like anthropology. That’s something that will be new to a lot of folks if you haven’t done those courses. But it’s interesting material.

[19:06] So if you find interest, you can put the time into reading it, you’ll be fine. Like you’ll be fine in the MCAT. There will be freebies or identify this term, match the definition. And if you’ve got those basics, even the research studies will come naturally. You just need to be exposed to the way you’re going to be tested. That’s all.

[19:21] Torah: You know what, you got me thinking. I really think, okay, so with Prep 101, the MCAT course. They offer it online. I feel like I’m just going to log in to one of the classes. It sounds like it’s going to be fun.

[19:36] Chansey: It probably will be fun. 

[19:37] Torah: I don’t know. I feel like I’m motivated to learn about it. This is good.

[19:40] Chansey: You’re not going to getting into psych soc now?

[19:41] Torah: Get into psych soc. 

[19:43] Chansey: You’re trying to make that A and A plus, is that why you’re doing this?

[19:46] Torah: Yeah. If I could call an A, then I better be able to study for five minutes and get an A plus.

[19:52] Chansey: That’s logical.

[19:53] Torah: Makes sense. For every five minutes you go up a grade point. Alright, well with that we will wrap and say psych soc is really well done by Prep 101, which is our sponsor. And they teach the comprehensive MCAT course, which covers everything that you need to know for your upcoming MCAT. And courses are starting right away. So always all around the calendar. So take a look at Prep 101/mcat and maybe we’ll see you over the course of the year joining us. And Chansey, I’m not sure, are you planning on teaching more psych soc stuff?

[20:24] Chansey: To be determined. 

[20:26] Torah: Hard to fit.

[20:27] Chansey: Don’t get me wrong. I do like throwing on the blazer with the tweed patches and thinking a different way from the Bio lab coat set up. So there’s a possibility, but it’s not committed yet.

[20:35] Torah: Alright. Cool. Well you might see Chancey, who knows, maybe I’ll branch out. No, I shouldn’t. 

[20:39] Chansey: See Torah? Yeah. You got an A, Come on. 

[20:42] Torah: I know, but I don’t feel like, well Prep 101 prides itself on having expert instructors and like I’m a cell biologist and a writer. Like CARS and Bio, that’s where I belong. I don’t know if I feel like I should, I don’t think you should pay the money to have me teach you Psych and soc. I don’t know. 

[20:57] Chansey: Well, whoever teaches you, it will be well if you do this and if you go it alone, just take the time to read the interesting studies and experiments and then rock a few practices and you’ll be fine.

[21:09] Torah: Once again, thank you for joining us on The Prep Me Podcast. Follow us on anywhere you get your podcast, subscribe and download and share with your friends. We’d love to hear from you again.

[21:17] Chansey: Thanks, everybody.