MCAT Mastery Enrollment

Everyone is always talking about how hard the MCAT is.

We hear about the rough curve, how you can’t really prepare for CARS, or how it’s incredibly nerve-racking to be judged on the results of a single exam.

But what if prepping for the MCAT didn’t have to be so ridiculous? What if you could go into the exam with confidence? What if you could take the exam just one time–or just one more time, if you’re a retaker–and move on?

Introducing MCAT Mastery, the new comprehensive program to help you ace the exam…

• Even if you’re not good at taking standardized tests.

• Even if you’re in school or working full-time.

• Even if you’ve hit a score plateau and can’t seem to break through.

Stop spending hours upon hours reading prep books and taking practice exams, only to see your scores stuck in the same place yet expecting to improve.

Stop having to tell people, “I know the material, but it’s not being reflected in my scores.”

Stop pushing back your test date because all you think you need is more time.

It’s time to have an actual game plan for the MCAT with a proven system.

With MCAT Mastery, you can:

• Access high-yield MCAT content: Study every topic area the test writers expect you to know with 100+ video lessons, at the level you need to know it. No low-yield, distracting fluff like you’ll find in cookie-cutter MCAT prep books.

• Learn proven strategies: Understand how to apply the test content you learn to break through your plateau. The MCAT is much more a test of strategy than content. Your prep needs to reflect that.

• Achieve a massive score increase: These same strategies have consistently yielded > 90th percentile scores. We’ve also seen greater-than-25-point increases, on multiple occasions.

See how some of our students performed with MCAT Mastery strategies:

When you decided to become a doctor, did you think it would feel like a rat race?

Did anyone tell you what GPA you would need to achieve–and how much studying that would require? How about the research and clinical experiences you needed to accumulate, or how your odds of getting into medical school would depend so heavily on one exam, taken on a single day?

Yet you get to this point, after years of preparation, still feeling anxious. Will you have to attend a lower-ranked school than you’d envisioned? Will you have to come up with a “Plan B” for your career in case things don’t work out?

Imagine if things were different.

Imagine having balance in your schedule. You would study for the MCAT for a pre-scheduled period and know exactly what to focus on. You would pursue your meaningful extracurriculars and still have time to rest with friends and family.

But it would be more than just achieving balance. You would see your scores incrementally increase and actually feel confident on test day.

Imagine seeing your practice test scores increase like this heading into your exam:

Instead, most students take a haphazard approach to their prep and roll the dice on test day.

Most people walk out of the MCAT thinking, “That was way harder than the AAMC full-length exams. I don’t know how I did. Hopefully, it went OK.”

Why would you want your odds of becoming a physician to depend on hope? Why not depend on a system that could help you significantly boost your chances of getting into med school?

We hate to say it, but adcoms don’t care about how many hours you put into your MCAT prep. When it comes to the MCAT, all they care about is your score.

Adcoms also care little about the unfair use of the MCAT to evaluate your application. They just want a quick way to judge your academic potential in their giant stack of applications.

One aspect of getting into medical school is differentiating yourself from the applicant pool. Another aspect is giving adcoms 0 reasons to reject you.

You know who’s hard to reject? You, if you have a great MCAT score. And we’ve helped many of our students achieve just that.

A lot of times, students see the success of others and think, “Yeah, of course, it worked for them. They’re probably just outrageously smart. I’m just not good at standardized tests.”

Before everyone was talking about “manifesting this” and “manifesting that”, Henry Ford, Founder of Ford Motor Company, said, “Whether you think you can or think you can’t, you’re right.”

If you think you’re going to perform poorly on your MCAT no matter what due to some innate standardized testing deficit, you’re not going to put in the necessary effort–or the right kind of effort–to reach your full potential.

If you believe you’re “just not good at taking standardized tests” well, you’re probably going to “manifest” a mediocre score, or worse.

Here’s the thing: No one is born with standardized testing skills. Getting good at taking standardized tests like the MCAT requires deliberate practice.

Don’t believe it? Then how can you explain the results of students who achieved a massive score increase during a retake?

If these students had resigned themselves to thinking that they’re “just not good at standardized tests” then they might not have retaken the exam. As a result, they might not have gotten into the med schools they did–or any med schools at all.

All of us make a few key life decisions that have an outsized impact on how things turn out.

Thoughts like, “I’m just not good at standardized tests” are called limiting beliefs. Did you work this hard just to limit your potential?

Choosing to believe that your dream MCAT score–and, by extension, a seat at your dream med school–is attainable, you’ll put in the right effort to make it happen.

We’ve seen it thousands of times. But the only person who needs to believe it is you.

“I’m frustrated because I know the content, but it’s just not being reflected in my test scores.”

We hear this line all of the time from students who have been self-studying for months.

They go on to describe how they have read content books cover to cover, taken thousands of practice problems, and exhausted all of their practice exams.

Unfortunately, rather than ask what might be wrong with their approach, they typically ask, “What other practice exams or qbank should I buy? I’ve heard [tools] are good.”

From a young age, we’re taught that more effort or some special hacks are the solutions to every academic problem.

Struggling to remember MCAT content? Try this new memorization technique and make flash cards.

Struggling with applying content on the exam? Spend more time reading your prep books.

Struggling with a score plateau? Do more practice questions.

It never ends.

If you’re struggling with breaking through, your main issue probably has little to do with test content.

Your main issue mostly has to do with test strategy weaknesses.

Standardized tests require an entirely different form of preparation than tests you take in school.

In elementary, middle, and high school, you could get away with memorizing and regurgitating information.

Think back to multiplication tables, proportions, or even derivatives. You either memorize (3 x 7 = 21, always!) or learn a strategy that applies to all cases (you can probably solve f(x) = x*2 in the first week or two of a calc class).

Same thing with history (World War II dates) or even biology (we’re sure you can recite the stages of mitosis without hesitation).

As you advance in school, your ability to rely exclusively on test content shrinks, and your need to rely on test strategy expands.

Perhaps you had a difficult time adjusting to college and your freshman year grades were lower than what you’d been accustomed to in high school. (If not, you probably know many premeds who experienced this.) College tends to expose an overreliance on memorization and underdeveloped skills in applying learned material.

The MCAT takes this exposure to a whole new level. It relies much more on test strategy than any other exam you have taken by this point in your life.

On the MCAT, content knowledge only allows you to understand what in the world the question is talking about. However, it’s often insufficient for selecting the right answer, especially when it comes to passage-based questions.

Here’s an example of a doozy of an MCAT question:

Vibrio anguillarum 531Ais a mixture composed of about 95% and 5% of highly pigmented cells (strain 531Ad) and cells with normal levels of pigmentation (strain 531Ac), respectively. Analysis of the V. anguillarum 531Ad DNA region encompassing genes involved in the tyrosine metabolism showed a 410-bp duplication within the hmgA gene that results in a frameshift and early termination of translation of the homogentisate 1,2-dioxygenase.

In a study, researchers complemented strain 531Ad with a recombinant clone harboring hmgA. This restored the original color to the colonies, confirming that in the absence of homogentisate 1,2-dioxygenase, homogentisate accumulates and undergoes nonenzymatic oxidation and polymerization resulting in high amounts of the brown pigment.

Researchers add exogenous homogentisate 1,2-dioxygenase mRNA to a culture of strain 531Ad. Which of the following is the most likely result?

A) The brown pigment remains.
B) The clear pigment remains.
C) The brown pigment turns back into the original pigment over time.
D) The original pigment turns into a brown pigment over time.

Now, imagine ~375 questions like this on the exam.

Unfortunately, basic standardized testing strategies aren’t enough to do well on the MCAT.

Back when you studied for the ACT or SAT, you learned multiple choice testing skills like the process of elimination. For instance, by removing one of four answer choices you can increase your odds of getting it right from 25% to 33%.

The MCAT test writers intentionally include distracting answer choices, or two that seem like similarly good choices. The test writers make it much more difficult to strike out answer choices.

Even when you can strike out an answer choice or two, you’re often not confident about deciding between the choices you’re left with.

How do you select between two seemingly good choices?

Going back to our question example, we know from the passage that homogentisate 1,2-dioxygenase translation is disrupted, meaning functional versions of the protein are not produced. This ultimately causes brown pigmentation.

While that helps us narrow plausible answer choices to A and C, how do we pick between them?

The test writers present a convoluted passage and a tricky question to test your knowledge of simple concepts—in this case, the central dogma.

The MCAT writers are testing not only your knowledge of replication, transcription, and translation but also your ability to apply those concepts to a novel situation. 

In the study in the passage, researchers complemented strain 531Ad with a recombinant clone harboring hmgA, which restored the original color to the colonies. This indicates that the translation machinery is still intact and that the problem is at the level of transcription. Therefore, the brown pigment will turn back into the original pigment over time, making choice C correct. If there were a problem at the translation level, adding exogenous homogentisate 1,2-dioxygenase mRNA to a culture of strain 531Ad would not affect the pigmentation, and the brown pigment would remain (choice A is incorrect).

You need to figure out what every MCAT question is really asking.

As you can see, even after spending weeks completing content review, you’ll need to learn how to consistently apply your knowledge to scenarios you haven’t encountered. There will be plenty of previously unseen scenarios on test day.

Content review will only get you so far.

As you develop confidence with your content knowledge and ability to apply proven strategies to get more questions right, you’ll begin to obsess over another obstacle: time management.

You know those ~375 questions you need to answer correctly? You need to do that while racing against the clock and experiencing serious anxiety.

Time management is one of the most difficult aspects of the MCAT.

Let’s be real. When taking practice tests, we typically do so under optimal conditions. Following a full night’s rest, we eat a good breakfast before heading to the library or snuggling up on the couch with our practice exam, taking breaks whenever we feel like it. (Even if we don’t take breaks, we could if we wanted to. After all, it’s just a practice exam…)

When you’re comfortable and clear-headed, it’s much easier to apply your content knowledge and standardized testing skills. You select your best answer without second-guessing and might even wrap up your practice exams early!

Test day is an entirely different animal.

Test day is reminiscent of the famous Mike Tyson quote: “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.”

When you plan to get 8 hours of sleep the night before your exam, you end up getting more like 5. That healthy, balanced breakfast you planned on having ends up being coffee and an energy bar.

During your drive, you attempt to recite amino acids in your head while staring at the clock. You might even hit unexpected traffic.

You get to your sterile testing center with your heart racing, hand over your ID, read through instructions, and have no control over your environment–who might be seated next to you, what noises you might hear, or what malfunctions you might experience.

Every question seems like the most important item on the exam. You feel confident about one of the answer choices until you see another. You begin to overthink. You can maybe get rid of one answer choice, but getting rid of two becomes difficult. Choosing the best answer between two that seem equally good while worrying about “losing easy points”? Good luck.

You start looking at the clock, wondering how you’re going to get through all the questions in that section on time, let alone have the opportunity to circle back to the items you flagged along the way.

Therefore, to do well on the MCAT, you’ll have to know test content and strategy so well that none of these external factors throw you off your game.

You have to be so proficient with your test-taking strategies that you can replicate your pace on practice exams on the real test.

Are you that proficient when it comes to managing time and speed without sacrificing accuracy? If not, you need more prep.

“I’m good with the science sections, but I’m not good at CARS.”

We receive a bunch of questions about science sections, like:

• “What are your best math tips for getting faster at Chem/Phys calculations?”

• “What mnemonics should I use to memorize amino acids and enzyme reactions?”

• “I know my content pretty well, but how do I translate that knowledge to points on the test?”

• “How do I approach a figure when I have no clue what it’s talking about?”

And so on. But nothing comes close to the number of questions we receive about CARS.

The reason you might struggle most with CARS is that you have no content knowledge to lean on.

With Bio/Biochem, Chem/Phys, and Psych/Soc, your content knowledge might cover up some of your weaknesses in test strategy,

When it comes to CARS, there is no content knowledge to hide behind.

Even as you develop your Bio/Biochem, Chem/Phys, and Psych/Soc skills, they might not translate to CARS.

On the flip side, mastering CARS is like a cheat code for unlocking the entire MCAT.

As you improve with CARS, you’ll notice how well your skills transfer across the other sections and all question types.

Believe it or not, there are methods to successfully analyze any CARS passage.

The CARS section essentially includes three question types:

• Type 1: Foundations of Comprehension

• Type 2: Reasoning Within the Text

• Type 3: Reasoning Beyond the Text

Within each of these categories, however, there are specific question architectures that the MCAT will use–and specific approaches to tackle each question type.

The Foundations of Comprehension questions, for example, include word-in-context, detail, and main idea questions. For each of these question subtypes, you need two key components to be successful: 1) the buzzwords to identify the question subtype; and 2) the correct algorithmic approach to answer it. 

In addition, the MCAT test writers routinely include the following distracting answer choices:

• Type 1: Extreme

• Type 2: Beyond the Sphere

• Type 3: Misused Passage Information

Let’s walk through an example together. 

Question: Which of the following statements is consistent with information in the passage?

Relevant text: “The principal conquests of the Romans were achieved under the republic...”, “The seven first centuries were filled with a rapid succession of triumphs; but it was reserved for Augustus to relinquish the ambitious design of subduing the whole earth, and to introduce a spirit of moderation into the public councils.”

a) Britain was conquered in order to recognize the Roman Empire’s past. b) Rome primarily conquered other countries while being governed as a republic. c) Rome was always rapidly expanding its territory. d) Agricola attacked Ireland to stage troops there before marching into Britain.

Based on the question and relevant text above, which of the answer choices can we eliminate because it’s too extreme?

Anytime you see words like “all”, “every”, “always”, or “never”, you must be 100% confident that use of that word is justified. Most of the time, these extreme words mean that the answer is incorrect.

In our above example, we see that choice C reads: “Rome was always rapidly expanding its territory.”

“Always” is a tricky word. Is there an hour of human history where Rome was not expanding its territory? Absolutely. So, we easily came up with a counterexample and can confidently eliminate answer choice C. 

There are deliberate strategies to tackle any question type or distracting answer choices that the MCAT writers might throw at you.

Some students have asked whether they have a “CARS ceiling”, that is, a maximum score they can hit before reaching their limits.

There is no limit.

Even better, once you deeply understand CARS strategies and can apply them efficiently, you’ll observe massive score increases across all four MCAT sections.

Stop focusing on limits and start focusing on possibilities

“I’m just not good at standardized tests.”

“I’ve hit a score plateau and can’t break through.”

“I just need more time to get through each question.”

“I’m good with the science sections, but I’m not good at CARS.”

All of these limiting beliefs are based on opinion, not fact.

When you buy into these stories and go down the rabbit holes of SDN and Reddit where other students complain about their lack of smarts, skills, or inherent unfairness of the MCAT, it’s hard to climb out.

Rather than bring yourself down, start thinking about “What if?”

What if you approached your MCAT prep with a proven system? What could your score be?

What if you were able to achieve a 515 or above? How about a 518+? How would your odds of getting into medical school change? Which medical schools could you get into?

The AAMC publishes invaluable data on what a score increase could do for your odds of getting into medical school: