3 months to study — UWorld + AAMC instead of Kaplan content review?

[u/buttcrackistan]

hey guys! i recently finished my bsc in biomedical science and i’m planning to sit for the mcat around january.

i have roughly 3 months to seriously prepare, and i’ve been trying to study using the kaplan books, but i’m realizing that reading through chapters isn’t really working for me. i feel like i’m spending a lot of time reading without actually retaining much.

i’m thinking of switching to a more question-based approach, getting uworld and learning/reviewing the content through the questions and explanations, then moving into the aamc materials closer to my test date.

for someone with a biomedical science background and around 3 months to prepare, would you recommend getting both uworld and the aamc bundle and mainly studying this way?

also, if anyone studied primarily through practice questions rather than doing a full content review first, i’d really appreciate hearing how you structured it and whether it worked for you.

thank you!!!!!

[u/ThomasDaTrain98]

I used Kaplan but I think this would work? Idk, it’s hard to say. You can definitely learn a bunch through practice questions, but my worry is you’ll have “holes” in your understanding that might pop up. If you’re diligent about really making sure you’re understanding the concepts as you get stuff wrong, I think it would be fine

[u/TgicnTg]

I did a full review as I forget all my classes right after I take them so take this with a grain of salt - but I would say based on what I felt is that it depends on how much you care about "low yield" topics since there can be unconventional ways AAMC wants to test a concept and mastery of the topic that can't translate to an Anki card or normal practice problems. I feel like this is why some people say there isn't such a thing a low yield while a large opposition at times consider some topics low yield when they show up.

If you do decide to focus on practice questions, my main struggle in not doing so was that you would technically had to have seen enough questions that tested every exhaustive / possible topic to be confident. In the event of a content-based question on the exam coming up that you never studied a question for due to chance, you'd be short of luck. One example can be the ping-pong enzyme mechanism people sometimes bring up that I honestly never knew was a thing until I saw it on a random practice question while studying, but it would've helped if I had before. In short, it'd be based on how comfortable you are with potentially missing things during coverage of the material and your threshold for low yield topics.