What Makes the MCAT so hard – Transcript

[00:08] Torah: Welcome to the Prep Me podcast. I am Torah and as usual, I am with my co-host Chansey. He no longer has a last name. And we just want to say. I can never pronounce his last name right. Okay. It’s just, it’s one of those.

[00:20] Chansey: But the thing is, you go for it though. You usually just go for it. And you know what? It’s because it’s a weird last name. It’s just Veinotte, like V-no.

[00:30] Torah: I realize that it is easy, but I’ve got a glitch in my brain. I can’t do it. So anyways today we are going to be talking about what makes the MCAT so hard. And before we begin, I want to quickly say what makes the MCAT so hard? Well, let’s flip it around. You know, what makes the MCAT easier is signing up for the, our sponsors Comprehensive MCAT course, And that is Prep101. They’re a very generous sponsors, and that’s what allows us to do this podcast and get it out to you today. So we will start, I will start with Chansey and say what makes the MCAT hard?

[01:05] There are many things that make it hard, and I have to acknowledge that was very, very smooth. As somebody who did not seek appropriate prep in time for the MCAT, it is so valuable that you do your prep, whether it be a course or time, which takes me into what makes the MCAT hard. It is an exam like no other. As an undergraduate or even as a graduate student. It is an exam that is going to be experienced like no exam you’ve ever done before in your past. I think there are many things that make it hard, but as someone who’s written plenty of MCATS, three, on my own, for my own personal agenda of applying to medicine scattered amongst undergrad, grad school, and then sort of in working years. But then like Torah, we write dozens and dozens of MCATs just to learn it

[01:53] Torah: For fun. Well, you know what? Before every MCAT season, I actually do a whole bunch of passages just ones that I pick up over the course of this year and whatever. And I just kind of get in the groove because I find one of the things that makes the MCAT hard is first of all the time. It’s 6 hour and 15 minutes of actual thinking time, seven and a half hour a day. It’s a big long day with obviously tons of pressure. I think what makes the MCAT hard is more than anything, and I think this is from my experience, talking to lots and lots of students over the years, is the internal dialogue, is the psychological warfare that students put on themselves. It’s like, I can’t do this. I don’t know. I’m getting stuck. It’s just that lack of confidence.

[02:38] I think that is the most intimidating part of the MCAT, because I will say this, the science is not hard, there’s just a lot of it. It’s just really broad. But it’s like first year bio and a little bit of intro, Biochem. It’s intro to intro organic chemistry. Although the organic chemistry tends to be on the hard side. Looking back, it’s been a long time since I’ve been an undergrad, but I look at the material and I’ll flip through the chem books just to scare myself. And I’ll be like, no, you know, I could do this. It’s not hard material, but there’s just, you get that stack of prep material, at the beginning of the Prep101 course, and you get this mailed to you and the students just, I can see their faces in my mind, it’s just, their faces go white.

[03:23] Chansey: Oh my gosh, what have I done? What have I done? I made a mistake. I need to rethink this because it matters. And you bring a good point, like, it’s the volume of manageable material. It’s not organic chem part to when you’re really diving into that crazy hard midterm. No, it’s more that instead of jumping in the 12-foot-deep end, you’re just waiting in the seven foot. Like, you can almost touch the bottom of the pool, but you’ve got to wait a little bit. You still have to put in some work because of that volume. There’s just so much volume and so many topics. That’s the difference of this test. They don’t ask you in undergrad to write one test on the 10 courses you did throughout the year and do it in seven hours. That’s what the MCAT is folks. Like, that’s what we’re asking you to do. But then we’re going to put this critical thinking label and umbrella on it at the same time, and also give you brand new information to learn on the test itself.

[04:10] And I think that’s one of the things that students find really intimidating, this idea that there’s new information in the passages. And it’s hard to kind of get your head around and own it and embrace it and be like, cool, I’m going to learn about an evolution of blue color of Robin’s eggs. I don’t know. I’m making that up. And you’re like, Oh yeah, I’m going to own this passage. And I think that what makes it particularly difficult. But I think also about what you brought up Chansey is the critical thinking aspect. And it is really unlike any other undergraduate test I’ve ever seen. I mean, I’ve seen exams across the country, across the continent really, for like my field of genetics and cell biology and stuff. And the MCAT I love, I have a huge appreciation for it’s difficulty.

[05:01] But this is what I like to say about the MCAT, is that it’s, it’s formulaic. There is a formula, there’s a system that they employ and it’s like, you could use people like Chansey and I to help crack that formula. There are typical questions that they ask. There are typical topics that they ask. And so, yes, it’s intimidating, but I think, our topic today is what makes the MCAT so hard. And I think the argument might actually be, it’s not that hard once you realize that the material’s not that hard. It’s learnable easily. But anyone who has got into university, you can master the material for the MCAT and you can learn how to think critically. Usually you have to be taught. I do find it’s not something you can learn on your own very easily, but I think it is a doable test, but it’s more intimidating than hard. So maybe we should have rephrased the whole title of today’s podcast. Maybe it should have been why is the MCAT so intimidating?

[06:00] Chansey: For sure. Because even the hard bit, like you’re saying, like the MCAT being hard, what makes the MCAT easy and more manageable is appreciating that it is hard. And knowing what you need to do to overcome the things that are out there for cracking this code and appreciating the time you need to invest in studying. And once you put that all forward, it’s not as hard as it once was. It’s a bit more reasonable. And the blanket statement is a bit more or a lot more unintimidating.

[06:26] Torah: Yeah. And I will say, I think one of the biggest stresses, especially early on in MCAT taking, is the time, is that students run out of time. Did you find that in yours? I mean, the first time you wrote, time maybe wasn’t a big issue because you were so prepared, with the other two.

[06:44] Chansey: Hold on now. This is a podcast for the many, the plenty not the one. So yes, I was maybe under prepared in my first time writing the MCAT, as somebody who wasn’t fully invested in medicine, thought maybe had a bunch of friends doing it. And I said I should do it too. And it wasn’t the best course of actions but time. So that’s the first thing I think we said. So the MCAT, what makes it hard? One of the things is time. For me prepping and doing sort of full like MCATs as part of practice. I think time was a little bit of a hindrance. It was definitely based on section. It wasn’t that it was the whole exam in terms of I ran out of time on the whole exam.

[07:20] Time may break it down to two sorts of conversations. One is per section, the sections that we struggle with the most, the CARS or for some people it might be the psych. So when you just find you’re a slow reader or you’re a big highlighter and you want to write out many statements to describe what you just read, time will eat you. It’ll get you that way. So it’s first section. The second way I see it, and maybe more for me and to Torah’s first point is time is I’m investing and I have to sit for six and a half hours doing a test on multiple subjects. Time is weary, it wears me down. It’s not my normal routine. I’m fatigued, I’m tired. I have a migraine. It’s the time that the full exam takes itself that can also just be a bit of a bit of a hurdle.

[08:02] Torah: But I will say that I think that’s one of the bigger challenges. And one of them is, I talk a lot about in the Prep101 MCAT course I teach for, and that is, you can build your endurance. I always find that first class, the first four-hour class they’ll do like bio one or CARS or whatever and students will just buy hour three. It’s just like, they’re just exhausted, just drained of all that mental and emotional energy that they want to invest in the MCAT. And then as the weeks go on, the endurance actually improves. And I think that’s one of the weird little advantages of taking a prep course, but I think that’s something you can do on your own as well, is to recognize that your intellectual endurance can actually be improved and so can your performance on the exam.

[08:50] So we have a lot of little tricks that pieces of wisdom that courses offer and that is from your instructors and things like after the fifth passage, you should have 40 minutes left. So these are the kinds of things where you have a strategy to get through the exam that has nothing to do with the material. And I think that’s one of the things that is a real stress for a lot of students is I can learn all the material. Now what, right? I know everything, but it doesn’t mean you’re going to do well in the MCAT because there are all these little hacks, there are all these little tips, there are all these little things you don’t recognize.

[09:24] Chansey: The strategies and things to avoid.

[09:28] Torah: There are all these traps that people fall into. And one of them of course is the negative self-talk. I think that makes it really, really, really difficult.

[09:35] Chansey: Oh, it’s so huge and you have to carry that through such a long exam. So it’s so easy for it to constantly be nagging in the back of your head. And for what you said, for me early compared to when I was writing the MCAT and scoring well and super competitive by the end of it, I certainly felt way less concerned about the time because I was doing real MCATs. I was doing four or six hours of studying per night. I was doing full lengths if not every week, every other week. So going into just a different environment, writing the same length of time my body was prepared for it. Like I knew what I was getting myself in for. So it was that prep like you said.

[10:09] Torah: And I think that one of the things I say all the time to my students that are prepping for the MCAT is that studying improves your speed, but the tactics improve your accuracy. So studying, because there are lots of questions in the science sections where I just read it and I just know the answer because, well I’m a biologist, because I know. I don’t have to read between the lines and summarize and paraphrase and identify distractors, all these different skills. It certainly improves your accuracy, but sometimes you just know it. You just plug it into the formula that you know you need to use. And that’s the answer and voilà. So, there’s a lot of knowledge that can help your speed on the exam, especially if you’re someone who generally runs out of time on most exams.

[10:55] I was the person, I was like always the second out of every exam I ever wrote, there was always that first person who writes a final exam and like they leave 10 minutes in because they have no idea what they’re doing. I was always next no matter what. So time has never been an issue for me, because I race, so I have to slow down. So I actually have to find tactics to slow myself down when I’m writing the MCATs. So I have to like write more and I have to like talk it through myself.

[11:24] Chansey: That’s a really good point too because what you’re saying I identify with you, like in undergrad in high school, I wasn’t second, you beat me, but I was in the top 5 to 10 and then I do the MCAT and I’m cruising through it like I think with the same amount of speed and I think I’ve got the knowledge, but it’s all those traps that got me as like, oh, I did not interpret that correctly in that car’s question stem or in that bio question stem and the first three MCATs. Yeah, maybe I was okay with time, but you know what? The outcome was not good. The grade, it was not good.

[11:53] Torah: I think, when you first step up to an MCAT and the first passage that we do in courses and stuff like that, students are blown away if they haven’t done one before. It’s so different. But you get better, you get better with practice, you get better with help, certainly. You get better with advice; you get better with strategies in order to tackle the test. This is very much a tactic test. Again, the material is broad and wide ranging and from multiple different units that you may have weaknesses in, but it’s not overly difficult. You’re not doing calculus in your head. So that’s not going to be on there. But I think that this is a tactic based exam where having a couple of things like my favorites are, Chansey, I don’t know what your favorite tactics are, but minor paraphrasing, you paraphrase the question stem.

[12:40] Because the MCAT is famous for a lot of gobbly goop in there question stems. You read the question and you need 10% of the information that’s in there, particularly for the sciences. There’s all this background information, the question is five lines long and all it’s asking for is what does Hexokinase do? And you’re like, oh well that’s the first enzyme a glycolysis because I’ve memorized that. And so I think paraphrasing is something that makes you so much more of an efficient MCAT. And it comes with, and I think one of the better pieces of advice I’d give students than they kind of look at me cross side at the beginning, is come at the MCAT a little bit with a cockiness and there’s a little bit of like a, ugh, the AMC, the people who write the MCAT, it’s like spit it out.

What are you trying to say here? No, no, no. I’m not going to get caught up in your silly wording here. No, no, no, no, no. I kind of sometimes actually even sit back physically and look at a question and be like, nope, you’re not going to get me here. Nope. This question I need none of this information. All this is about is what is hexokinase. And it takes a lot of cojones to kind of like think you’re smarter than the MCAT because you’re not. But there’s a little bit of a edge that sometimes when I’ll read a passage, I’ll kind of have this like, okay, what are you trying to say? And if that’s in my mind, I actually find I perform better. There’s that confidence that comes with practice really, with having a set of principles that you can guide yourself through when taking this test.

[14:14] Chansey: And I think you’re right. I think you need to overcome these really wordy and jargony question stems. And just like you say, get to the point. Yes, okay, there are three sentences in that question stem. But you want this for me right now with these four answers below and I know that’s what you want. So you know what, you can mess off. I’m going right to the answer and this is what you actually want. And moving on. And that confidence is something that it isn’t innate for a lot of people. They get that from like listening to you and me and instructors and doing the practice and learning the strategies because otherwise you’re going in there just a little bit cold and a bit novice to that and you’re spending so much time being like, okay, but maybe they meant this or maybe they meant that. Or maybe, all these maybes and all these confusions and all the self-doubt and getting worked up. And that’s what we want to prepare people for. We want to try to avoid that on test date. You can do that early, but we don’t want you doing it when you go to your test center for the real MCAT.

[15:04] Torah: Well I think, so what I’m hearing here, what we’re saying is that, you know, yes the MCAT’s hard but with certainly practice and especially using advice and practicing with that advice. And I will say in our sponsor, I will give a shout out to our sponsored here. Prep101 offers comprehensive MCAT courses, and they come with a set of tactics. And so where they call them strategies, tactics, advice, this test taking advice as long as you can, like, it’s like golf. My husband’s obsessed with golf right now and he thinks swing thoughts. It’s like what do you think about when you step up to the ball? Give you three swing thoughts. And it’s kind of like that on the MCAT, like my swing thoughts when it comes to knocking my drive 300 yards on the MCAT is like, okay read for the main idea, paraphrase the question stem and eliminate with confidence. And I think those are probably my three that are like the tactics I’ve practiced and practiced and practiced and practiced and practiced and teach and teach and teach and teach and drill into students. And those are the three I probably lean on the most. You?

[16:14] Chansey: Yeah. I think to some variation of the exact same thing. It’s just you start with the mental model of I can do this and I’m doing this the right way because I’ve invested the time. Yes, what makes the MCAT hard or lots of things we’ve said it’s a long test. There’s a lot of material, it’s a different style of test. They try to trap you, they try to trick you. So you need to learn the strategies. And honestly for me it’s just putting the time in and putting it in the red areas. Anybody can read a textbook if they’ve got a few hours to do it and learn material out of a page. What they can’t do on their own typically is these strategies. And I think it’s so important that again, you can read and not be thrown for a loop or lack your confidence, just because you’re see new information.

[16:50] Because you have to remember, you also know a ton of information and you know what the MCAT’s going to do. You can predict even if it’s in CARS, that’s a section I struggle with and Torah loves CARS, but I struggle with CARS early on. And what made CARS more obtain for me was just predicting the kind of questions that they’re going to ask me and really putting on the glasses, the shirt, the pants, the shoes, the belt of the author so that I could answer questions like I’m the one who wrote that body of information. And that’s what made the difference for me, is that prep work and that investment to understanding what is the MCAT trying to do to trick me here? How are they trying to test this appraisal and me be ready for it so that when I see a question type, like I’ve got the confidence and that’s swagger to say I know what you’re asking here and this is the answer. And moving on.

[17:33] Torah: So the reality is MCAT is hard, but what makes it hard is often not the lack of knowledge because everyone can gain the knowledge. Everyone walks into the MCAT I think with a significant amount of science facts smashed into their brain. What makes it hard is the strategies that you need, the confidence you need in those strategies and making sure that you believe in that process that you’ve been practicing and the practice that’s required. So the thing is, and I think that is something that really needs to drill here, is that that can be taught the tactics. It’s not something you come. There’s no such thing as the friend, your cousin of your friend who didn’t study and got some massive score on MCAT. That person doesn’t exist. I want names if they do because I don’t believe you.

[18:22] So you do have to practice, you do have to study and ultimately you have to be taught and or teach yourself. It’s up to you. But a system of strategies, of tactics that you can employ and you can rely on to get you through those tough questions. Because sometimes you just know the material and you know it’s C and you’re good and you’re confident with that. But most of the time you’re having to parse your way through questions and map and paraphrase and do all these tactics that Prep101 teaches. And lots of other companies teach something similar. But it’s just the idea of relying and practicing the tactics that makes the MCAT hard because you’ve never had to use them before because undergrad doesn’t ask you for that.

[18:59] Chansey: And you want to learn them early so that when you’re got them in your bank and in your arsenal, so that all the practice that you’re doing from then and out, you are employing them and you’re applying them. That’s the biggest thing. You want to learn them early, not the week before your MCAT being like, oh, epiphany, this is how they do curse. These are the ways that get tricked. It’s a bit overwhelming to wait that long. So do it early and get your practice in for sure.

[19:18] Torah: Alright, so MCAT is hard, but it’s doable. We believe in you listeners, we can help you on your journey. And we won’t intimidate you any further, it’s good. You can do it. So thank you for listening today to the Prep Me podcast on behalf of myself, Torah, and Chansey, my trustee co-host and follow us. Find the Prep Me Podcast on any social media where you find Prep101 because they are our trusted sponsors. And so we want to thank them again as always for helping us reach out to you and give you the best edge you can to get into medical school. Thanks Chansey.

[19:52] Chansey: Thank you Torah.

[19:53] Torah: We’ll talk again.

[19:54] Chansey: Sounds great.