(gentle music)
- When are you taking the MCAT?
From friends and family members
familiar with the pre-med journey,
this question is one of the first to barrage you
after you've made the decision
that you're going to apply to medical school.
For some, the response is easy.
"I don't know yet."
For others, a test day has been set, a plan created,
and you're ready to go.
But what happens
when everything doesn't go according to plan?
Hi, my name is Prashanth Kumar, or PK,
and I'm an MCAT tutor at Shemmassian Academic Consulting.
Today, I'm going to be talking with you all
about my MCAT journey.
How I went from a 507 to a 525 on two test dates,
18 point increase, and how I got over that block.
I'm going to be going over some tips, some strategies,
and hopefully some helpful advice
on how to conquer this MCAT retake.
It's a brutal exam, but we can do it.
Let's get it.
(bright music)
The concept of retaking the exam was never on my mind.
In high school, I had taken the SAT once,
one-and-doned it, end of story.
Throughout college, same exact thing.
I'd take classes, never had to retake a class,
take exams, never had to retake an exam.
So, I was feeling good.
Maybe it's a little bit cocky, but I was feeling confident.
And then you open that scoreboard.
And when I saw that 507, I was not happy.
I felt empty, hopeless, very sad,
like all that hard work I had put in before meant nothing.
And it's important to note that it wasn't the 507
that made me feel this way.
It was that on my practice tests,
I had been scoring significantly higher.
Come test day, it wasn't the same range.
And that was what hurt.
It was that feeling of not performing
to your fullest potential even after X months of studying.
That was the pain.
Now, let's get into my mindset going into this first exam.
It was roughly Thanksgiving time and I was thinking,
when do I want to take this exam?
I decided let's do mid to late January
because then I can get it done
before the spring semester of classes.
This gave me eight weeks of study time.
So, I go in, I'm like,
"First four weeks will be content review,
last four weeks will be for practice questions,
full-length tests, all of that."
I didn't have a day-by-day agenda,
I didn't know what I was going to do
and how much studying I was going to have to do every day
to accomplish those goals.
So it wasn't a great plan.
And I realized this
as my study schedule fell apart almost immediately.
When you come back from Thanksgiving,
this is oftentimes the most busy time of the year
in terms of school.
I had final exams, tests,
projects all crushed into these few weeks of December.
So when I got through all that,
it was already late December.
So my first four weeks of studying were very, very weak.
I had only skimmed through a few chapters here and there,
and that was totally against my plan.
So, rather than reevaluate where I was, I was just like,
"Let's just sprint through the rest of it."
And that was a big mistake.
And so when I go into test day, I've taken practice tests,
I know the material from classes, I've skimmed through it,
but I don't really know where my weaknesses are
because I haven't been focused on them.
And when that score report came back with a 507,
it was heartbreaking.
It was something I wasn't expecting.
And to be honest, it sucked.
But what mentality shift did I have
going into my second exam.
As any retaker knows,
the feelings after that first test come out
cripple you long after just the score date.
Your self-confidence is an all-time low,
you doubt whether you want to take the exam again
or have the energy to study.
You don't want to do this.
You start questioning whether med school is right for you.
All of these things start coming out, right?
But what can we do to fix that?
How do we get to the next step?
So, in my mind, what I did was started to journal.
Journaling was very helpful
to figure out why I was feeling the way I was feeling.
What weaknesses were coming out.
And it started putting me in a healthier mental state.
Now, not everyone likes
to pour their emotions out into the pages, which is fine.
But figuring out something
that can break down that mental wall is very important.
And so once I got into that healthier state,
I was able to come up with a plan to tackle these weaknesses
and overcome these doubts.
And slowly but surely,
I came up with a plan on how I was going to retake the MCAT.
Now let's get right into it.
Let's talk about some tips and strategies that I used
to help me prepare for my retake
that you can apply to your own story,
regardless of whether that's a practice test
that you want to improve upon
or an official's test score that you need to retake.
We can apply these skills and improve our scores.
And let's start with the first one.
Let's not rush into a retake.
So, this is not possible for every person,
depending on what their timeline is.
Oftentimes, there's a belief
that it was just a fluke, right?
"I studied, I had a bad day, I can come back."
Take a step back, reflect, maybe journal,
think about what your weaknesses are,
come up with a game plan,
whether that's a couple of weeks, a month, two months,
be honest with yourself
and figure out how long is it going to take you
to sort of destroy this test the second time?
So, my second tip is to find your weaknesses.
And this is oftentimes one of the harder things to do
because it requires a certain level of introspection.
And for me, that was realizing
that I had some large gaps in both content and practice.
And that was inherently hurting my scores.
I probably should have realized something was up
when my scores on my practice tests
were all fluctuating very heavily.
I wasn't getting straight 130s or straight 128s
or straight 129s.
I was bumping up and down.
And while my total score was staying the same, roughly,
the breakdowns were very, very different.
And so that can be an indication of some weaknesses
and that I was getting lucky here and there.
So, the way I like to do it is to ask yourself,
"What are the main issues?"
Whether it's content, whether it's timing,
whether it's strategies or practice, or all the above.
And writing that down
or asking yourself that out loud and saying,
how do we improve on that
to the point where we're no longer having these issues,
or we feel comfortable with timing
beyond what we were before?
So being able to ask yourself
and looking at those weaknesses is very, very important,
and building a plan
to take down those weaknesses just as important.
So, my third tip is
to map out your study schedule completely.
And I mean really getting there
and think about every single thing you're going to be doing,
how much time you're going to be taking
for each of those parts, and going from there.
So, write it all down.
Commute, sleeping, eating, school time, homework time,
working out,
how much time you have to actually study for the MCAT.
By putting all of that together,
you sort of get a sense of
how much time you have to dedicate,
and by then, how many months
or weeks you'll have to dedicate
to get to your new score threshold.
Another thing I like to be programming in is flex days.
Flex days are rest days,
but they have the ability to act as sort of a make-up day.
The important thing is
that we don't get burnt out with our schedule
and we're able to maintain the high-level of studying
and high-level of reviewing,
a high-level of practicing throughout the entire schedule.
Until test day, we can't burn out.
And so having these flex days programmed in,
very, very helpful.
The fourth tip is perfect practice.
I stole this from Vikram's video earlier on his 528 series.
So go check that out if you haven't.
But it's the idea of practicing with meaning.
Doing questions alone or doing practice tests alone,
sheer quantity is not going to do as much,
if not anything in the longterm, for your study.
What will though is
figuring out where you're making mistakes,
hammering those areas out, and making them into strengths.
If I'm missing questions around a certain topic,
I want to spend some time going over that topic,
writing down the mistake, and figure out why I'm doing that
and never make that same mistake again.
And so what was my routine?
I would take a notebook,
write down every single piece of information I didn't know
from the question or answer choice,
write it down in a composition notebook
or put it in a spreadsheet and go about that topic
and write down everything I didn't know about the topic.
So that if you get that topic on a future test
or you get a similar type of question on a future test,
you should be like, "Thank God.
I've been studying for this.
I've been crushing this.
I'm ready to go."
So my final tip is
to build a test day routine and confidence.
I think routine and confidence are the perfect couple.
Without routine, confidence is really hard to build up.
Why do we take an eight-hour practice exam
before every MCAT?
We want to get comfortable taking the test.
We want to get comfortable sitting in that chair
for X hours, comfortable taking the breaks at those times.
So we are building a routine.
So that on test day, we're not taking the test blind.
We know what's happening, we know how we're feeling,
we know how to get to the point where we need to get to.
And so just like that, there's other ways to build routine.
For me, that was reading a passage paragraph by paragraph,
summarizing in three to five words next to each paragraph
what was going on, and then going into the questions.
Another thing I like to do is not look at the time,
because that's a very stressful part of the exam,
is how much time do I have left?
Am I going too slow?
Am I going too fast?
I had one checkpoint, question 30,
where I would see if I had 50 minutes left.
And you can choose how much time you want to have left
at what question,
and by having one checkpoint, you can tell yourself,
"Oh, I need to speed up.
Oh, I need to slow down," at those points.
And it helps maintain a sense of confidence
because you know exactly where you are at the test.
And so these are small changes
that aren't going to be too hard to implement,
but they have tremendous capabilities
of boosting your confidence.
I would write down exactly what I'm going to do on test day,
how I'm going to wake up, eat breakfast, everything.
And what happens if a hard passage comes up.
I'm going to close my eyes, take a deep breath,
and then go back at it.
By planning this out,
I know exactly what's going to happen when I take the test,
regardless of easy or hard passages.
It's the same way Michael Phelps visualizes his race
before he does it, right?
He knows exactly what he's going to do,
how he's going to jump off the block,
and what strokes he's going to hit.
I think by maintaining the same attitude about by the MCAT,
a daunting exam where we need every piece of confidence,
if you know exactly what's going to go down,
you'll feel more comfortable with it.
(bright music)
And there you have it.
That is nearly every single piece of information
and technique I used to retake this exam.
I like to think of the MCAT as an opportunity
to show off what you got.
Some people will not be able
to capitalize on that opportunity.
Some people will be stressed.
But the more comfortable we get with the exam,
the more we believe in ourselves,
and the more we're ready to destroy that test,
I genuinely believe makes you a better test-taker
and makes you ready to conquer this beast.
If I can do it, you can do it.
It's not easy, but it's feasible.
Let's get it.
(bright music)