Customer Reviews

Kaplan PCAT 2010-2011 Edition

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

I used this text extensively as test preparation. It's a decent review book but if I were to do it over I would use another resource as a significant supplement to this.

As others have stated, the sections on writing, verbal, and reading comprehension are so short that they may as well have been omitted. Then again, I don't know what could have been included to realistically help for these sections, so I was satisfied with the content.

Biology and chemistry have extensive review sections, but I don't get the feeling that the amount of effort I spent to review the material in this book was really helpful compared to the subject matter variety on the actual exam. For example, the organic chemistry review was laughable to the point of being misleading about the content of the actual exam. Chemistry could really help more if it helped zero in on these are the elemental data, formulas, etc. you really need to memorize, etc. With the amount of biology material presented, I was surprised how many questions on the actual exam were not covered at all in the review (thinking of entire subjects not touched on - I am obviously not expecting the review materials to cover every possible question.)

Quant review was decent, though more practice problems for the calculus and more difficult problems could easily substitute for the simple problems included. Just having more MC problems would be nice. Many of the concepts had only 1 or 2 practice questions - not enough IMO. More practice would be better!

With respect to format, one somewhat frustrating aspect of the text is that many of the "review" problems are short answer format instead of multiple choice. Thus, though it reviews the material, it doesn't do so in a PCAT-specific manner (i.e. helping get used to the way questions are presented.)

This book is also missing any relevant test taking tips. Maybe this is because Kaplan really doesn't have a good handle on what Pearson (the PCAT administrator) is doing - I don't know. It would have been helpful, for example, to comment on the unlikelihood of realistically completing the quant section and how to identify good problems to cherry-pick to maximize score. Or, state whether you will get a periodic table (yes, you can find out this info elsewhere, but this seems to be content appropriate for a review book.) It just isn't really helpful in suggesting how to approach the exam.

Reading this again, I was probably too hard on this book. In summary, it's a decent resource, but I would be interested in supplementing with other materials if I were to take it again. Hope this helps someone.

I expected this book to be well-organized and very helpful. It is fairly thick and certainly contains some very good review material in it. Especially biology and chemistry material. However, there are very brief descriptions on many concepts that require more in-depth explanations. A lot of the chemistry equations weren't explained too well, for instance. As I understand that only so much material can fit in one book, this is acceptable.

What is entirely unacceptable is that many of the questions, both practice Q's and questions in the final exam (a ton in the math portion) have severe typos that cause the questions to be unanswerable. I felt uncomfortable with the severe amount of typos. It made me wonder whether some of the answer key had typos too, which would lead me to misgrade my answers. Also, the answer sheet lacks choice E on all questions on the exam that have choices A-E. This book is completely amateur for these reasons.

Also, the organic chem section is completely lacking.

I just got my PCAT scores back and this book was close to the only thing I used to study. The chemistry and biology sections are very good reviews. Yes there are many typos, but they are usually obvious enough that they will not mislead you. However, the organic chemistry section only addresses a few functional groups. The math section does not have enough calculus, so I took a practice test and reviewed the concepts that appeared on that exam. The verbal section and reading comprehension section are too short to actually help the reader. Lastly, the writing section is basically two pages. In closing, this book is a good review of inorganic chemistry and general biology (I was in the 99th percentile for both the chem and bio sections), but I would get an additional aid for the writing, verbal and reading comprehension sections... and look over your old organic and calculus notes. The organic chemistry on the exam is a breeze if you are a chem major so I wouldn't worry too much about it.

I'll begin by saying that Kaplan clearly does not understand the market base of people that need this book. I assume most people interested in purchasing this book are holding or about ready to be holding bachelor's degrees in a science related field. This book seems to cover things that are (or at least I think) are easy concepts to understand in introductory 100 level college classes, not the depth that someone preparing to take a PCAT examination would want.

Here's my opinion section by section: (I have taken the test already)

Section I - PCAT strategies:

This gives a brief outline of what the test is like and how to take it. I could write this section. Basically this section gives test taking strategies that if you've gotten to this point in your life you should already be aware of. Ex: Don't panic, manage your time, eliminate the two answers that are obviously wrong, etc...

Section II - Verbal Ability

Hmmmm... well this section basically shows you how to approach analogies, shows you roots of words, and basically tells you to read a dictionary to brush up on vocabulary. Not really helpful for a reference book to tell you to read a dictionary. What they should have done is taken 500 words from PCATs previously given and defined them for you. Short, brief, and concise definitions that really wouldn't take up a lot of page space.

Section III - Biology

This section is extremely, extremely detailed. In fact too detailed to actually be of much use. Do you really want to read 10 pages of endocrinology and memorize or re-memorize the functions of about 20 hormones and their origin only to see it not show up on the test? Or if it does show up, it would be that one trivial question that in the grand scheme of things probably doesn't matter anyway.

Section IV - Reading Skills

Did you do okay in ninth grade English? Do you know the difference between a fact and an opinion? If so, omit this section.

Section V - Quantitative Ability

If you need to review PEMDAS and how to add fractions then you should rethink your career choice however, Kaplan feels they should elaborate more on this. Meanwhile they give a cursory review important things you may have forgotten like Trig Identities (sin^2theta + cos^2theta = 1), how to integrate, solving definite integrals, and limits. Seriously, nothing at all on limits.

Section VI - Chemistry

A total of 203 pages in this section, and a whopping 15 pages (yes I counted) of organic chemistry. Now the PCAT chemistry section is roughly half organic chemistry and well... thanks to the quantitative ability section I can calculate that organic chemistry represents 7.5% of Kaplan's section on chemistry. I do not need positive reinforcement by reviewing the easy freshmen chem class, in fact I bought this book mainly as a reference for Orgo... fail. Absolutely terrible.

Section VII - Writing

See section IV

Section VIII - Final Exam

So this section includes a full test and detailed explanations to the answers. This is probably the only useful tool in this book for preparation.

Let me close by saying I have not written this review in anger about doing poorly on the exam (I think I did okay actually), I have tried to give my honest opinion that this book is not worth the $26 dollars you will pay for it. My advice is to buy some practice exams and review things you have gotten wrong from your college class materials. The exams will also speed up your answering for the real thing (this is important). Good luck on the exam!

I graduated from college in 1998 and have always wanted to go to pharmacy school. After investigating what the requirements would be, I decided to purchase this book as a guideline for the exam. Even though I've been out of college for over 10 years, my background is in microbiology/chemistry so I had plenty of reference books already for these subjects. After looking through this book, the organic chemistry section is indeed lacking, but the general chemistry section is a very good review in my opinion. There are a multitude of typos and errors in the math section though that do make answering some of the questions difficult. I would definitely suggest reviewing your algebra, statistics, and first/second semester calculus courses. Even though I have a strong background in microbiology(bacteriology), I do not have much knowledge of "general" biology. I used this book as my only source for the biology section of this exam and found it to be adequate. The biology section was my lowest score but it was still competitive. I found the reading and verbal analogy sections very good practice which paid off for me as these sections were my highest scores. I would definitely suggest increasing your vocabulary to score well on these sections! There are many other guides available on Amazon to help with this. One other thing, it would definitely be worth it to brush up on your writing skills. It's been a number of years since I've had to write an essay let alone two! Time management is essential so make sure you keep this in mind. Anyways, this book was extremely useful in my case. On my first try taking the exam, I achieved a very competitive score, and I can honestly say, that would not have been possible without my having this book as a guide!

My background: lots of undergrad chemistry & math taken >10 years ago, but very recent biology.

You can sum this book up as follows:

Under no circumstances should anybody use this book as their exclusive source of preparation and study material. Why?

#1) Errors - there are a few jaw-droppers in this, as others have pointed out. Some are obvious but others are more subtle. If something doesn't look quite right or an illustration doesn't seem to match up with the text, you should consult an outside source. Fortunately, I still own my undergrad biology, chemistry, and calculus books and I used them extensively.

#2) Organic Chem - the organic chemistry included in this is a joke and would lead you to believe that knowing the difference between and alkane and alkene along with some basic naming conventions is enough for the PCAT. It's not. Review o-chem 1 notes or a text for basic reactions like dehydration synthesis, additions, etc.

#3) Quantitative - Essentially no mention of trig functions in the calculus section which also happens to be pretty terrible. Get a calc book out, look at the integral/derivative tables. If you're still struggling with algebra... I wish you well.

#4) Practice tests - Many of the questions have 5 choices but the bubble sheet in the book only has 4 bubbles/question. Pearson's own practice tests only have options A-D. So what gives? It's like they didn't even try here.

So what's good? The biology is pretty decent if you can avoid the glaring errors. Chemistry (except the aforementioned o-chem) is also pretty good. Quite honestly, if you can't read and have a terrible vocabulary it's probably not going to be helped out much by heavy review so I can't objectively say if the book is decent or not in this regard. The essay section gives some OK tips on how to break up the time.

Bottom line: This book offers a decent outline for studying but anyone actually taking the PCAT should: 1) buy the PCAT practice exams from Pearson & 2) dig out their old general chemistry, Campbell's Biology, and a calculus text, 3) stay vigilant for errors in the book.

Update: So I took the test and have to say that I'm even more convinced than before that outside of the biology and inorganic chemistry, this book is a collossal waste of time. (And this isn't sour grapes, my score was excellent.) I would reiterate my earlier suggestion to purchase the Pearson Practice PCATs, take one of them, find your errors go back with your textbooks and work all the practice problems you can find on that subject. Then take the 2nd practice test, work more problems and finally the week before take the last practice test in as close to a "test setting" as possible. The practice PCATs cost 3x of this book but they were worth every penny, which I can not say for this book.

I took the PCATs in January of 2010. This book is EXCELLENT for the biology section. There wasn't really anything on the test that it didn't cover. Unfortunately, it is not so great for the math or chemistry section at all. I HIGHLY recommend taking a prep class instead of solely relying on this or other books.

This book helped a lot to prepare me for the PCAT. This year, my overall score was in the 90th percentile. The reviews for math, verbal reasoning, vocab, biology, and general chemistry were very helpful and thorough, but concise.

My only criticism is that it was somewhat lacking in Organic Chemistry, especially with regard to the dynamics of certain chemical reactions. Nomenclature and general concepts were covered well, but I needed to go to my old Orgo textbook to refresh my memory of things such as various substitution and elimination reactions.

I would recommend this strongly to someone who was preparing for the PCAT, the only caveat is to make sure you have resources outside of this book for reviewing organic chemistry and building your vocabulary.

This was a pretty decent study guide for the PCAT. However, it had more than a few errors. I stopped counting after ten. Some were obvious like misspellings, but some points were outright wrong. I even double-checked in two A&P textbooks to make sure.

What this and most other PCAT study guides fail to mention is that there is quite a bit of statistics covered on the actual PCAT. I think 10-15% of the questions in the quantitative section were on basic key concepts in stat, things that you would only know if you have taken a stat class, at least it seemed that way on the version I took (Sept 2011).

I am glad I used this book, along with several others, include two MCAT guides to cross-check on the biology section. I got a 96 percentile overall and 98 in quatitative.

This review book pretty much offers NO help on the reading comprehension, vocabulary, and essay section. There are 3 reading comprehension practices (excluding the pretest and practice exam) and a bit of vocabulary. Basically their tip for the vocab section is like "read more books" and "look up words you don't know." I dont know but that didnt really offer me much help. In addition, there are several mistakes made in the practice problems and in some cases the information given. Found quite a bit of mistakes on the math section. What irritated me even more was that in their full length practice test, there were mistakes made on the questions! I was practicing on timing myself and came across multiple problems with mistakes which threw me off and pretty much ruined my practice. Don't expect much from this book. I found free internet sources with better information than this junk!