Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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361 of 373 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Ignore people who say they used their textbooks to study..., October 31, 2004
MY STORY:
Lets start with my score on the first MCAT I took... 13. (8V, 3PS, 2BS) My score on the MCAT of Aug/03 was 35. (12V, 12PS, 11BS) I am not that smart but at the moment I am at Georgetown School of Medicine with a scholarship and I owe it completely to Examkrackers. I never took a prep course and I also only took 32 hours of science courses ever. I was a finance major.
HOW I PREPARED:
I studied at a bookstore for the MCAT and in addition to having my textbooks, every widely available MCAT resource, and every esoteric text I could buy on Amazon, I bought all the examkrackers stuff. I also bought the past exams available from AAMC. After the first month, I realized using anything but Examkrackers stuff and the AAMC stuff was detrimental to my progress. I spent around 450 HOURS STUDYING and taking practice exams. My practice exams came from Gold Standard, Kaplan, Examkrackers, and the actual past exams from AAMC. You should take a practice exam every week but only trust your scores from the examkrackers and the aamc's. The rest are just practice.
MY ADVICE:
TEXTBOOKS?!? If someone tells me they used their textbooks to study, I wonder if they have even been to the AAMC website. Look at the content description for the MCAT!
Examkrackers is the only company that covers the stuff on the MCAT with great detail and ignores everything else. They also keep it interesting with illustrations, jokes, etc. Want proof? Why hasn't Kaplan changed their books or the content of their prep course (that course is a joke) after the AAMC changed the content of the MCAT? Examkrackers is interesting and it provides you with a plethora of questions to practice.
If I had it to do over again, I would buy the past exams from AAMC (a must, you are cheating yourself if you don't) and everything possible from Examkrackers (the CD's are a must too). After doing that I would look myself in a room with them for around 400-500 hours and then sit the exam. This is a guranteed recipe for success.
MY WARNING:
You may be successful doing other things or spending less time studying but let me warn you that nothing is more time consuming or expensive then spending an extra year in college or doing some lame research because you couldn't get into med school on the first try. Dish out the money on these prep materials, put in the time and you will be in med school in august.
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85 of 85 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Great Review Platform, December 4, 2002
I bought this 5 volume set and the Audio Osmosis CDs and spent 3 weeks pouring over them in preparation for the August 2002 MCAT. Additionally, I purchased the 1001 question series for the subjects in which I was feeling weak. I was barely able to get to any of the 1001 question books in that time.10 years after originally taking the courses covered on the exam, I managed to score in the 80-90 percentiles. Considering how many new graduates I was testing against, I am happy with that result. I thank the Examkrackers series for my good score. The books and CD lectures cover all of the subjects on the MCAT and allow you to realize your weak spots. I made a set of flash cards from the CD lectures and books on points of information that I was rusty on. I then memorized those flash cards. I understand Jon and Jordan are coming out with a set of flash cards so that may save you a step. As a bonus to buying their books, you can access their website at examkrackers com and chat with Jon and Jordan themselves. They will personally answer any questions you have. Also, they have a medical career counselor who will answer your career based questions. From their website, I see that they offer in-class preparation courses on the East Coast. That may be a good option for people living in that area. Hands down this is the best series for MCAT preparation.
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35 of 35 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
All the information you need and nothing more, October 14, 2005
This study package is marketed as the only one out there that gives you everything you need to know and nothing more. That's absolutely true. While studying for the MCAT, I used these books as my sole source of review material and found nothing lacking. I had friends who were taking Kaplan and Princeton Review prep courses, and I looked at the books they used: they all tell you to memorize way more info than you need. They're also a lot more boring than the Examkrackers books, because, face it: if you're going to spend three months poring over some review books, you might as well get ones with color pages, a really dorky cracker mascot, and at least some sense of personality behind the writing voice. The Examkrackers books won't ask you to waste valuable brain space on extraneous material, and the style of the books favors conceptual understanding over rote memorization (though of course the latter is used when appropriate, as with biological sciences).
I would suggest that in addition to buying this package, you also get the Examkrackers "101 Passages in MCAT Verbal Reasoning". It's probably the only good book out there for practicing MCAT verbal questions and it's an absolute must. I was scoring 9's on the Verbal before I worked through it, and 12's by the end.
I would say that if you can learn and memorize all the things that these Examkrackers review books tell you to, you are completely set in terms of knowledge. Everything else is just practice, and for that I suggest doing all the tests you can get your hands on. The AAMC publishes old MCATs which are DEFINITELY worth buying, despite the expense. For more practice I would also suggest Princeton Review's "Practice MCATs" and Kaplan's "MCAT Practice Tests" (each contains two complete tests) as well as Kaplan's "MCAT 45". Examkrackers also puts out a book titled "16 Mini-MCATs" which I found to be useful for additional practice. The only caveat I can add is that Princeton Review's practice tests are written to be harder than the actual MCAT -- they will ask you questions about stuff that is contained in their books but is NOT on the MCAT. Therefore, I wouldn't panic if you find that you don't do well on them. The Examkrackers and Kaplan tests ARE commensurate in difficulty to the MCAT so they are more useful for gauging your performance.
I did not use any of the Examkrackers 1001 Questions series, because I understand that all of the questions in those books are stand-alone, which is unrepresentative of the real MCAT, on which almost all the questions are passage based. However, if you're having trouble learning the science, they might be a good option because stand-alone questions really test your knowledge base. Just keep in mind that success on the MCAT is based just as much on how well you can glean information from passages as it is on pure knowledge. And learning how to glean is something that only practice with actual MCATs (either real AAMC ones or test company-made ones) can give you.
So basically, my point is that if you use this study package and practice the hell out of all the practice tests you can find, you should be fine. I never took a MCAT prep course (couldn't afford one) so all I did was shell out about $300 for books and tests, and I ended up with a nice 42R. (15P, 13V, 14B) It can be done. Examkrackers can help you do it. Go buy this study package now. ^_^
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