One of the biggest mistakes you can make while studying for the MCAT (and in fact, I made this mistake myself!) is spending too much time on content review.

I spent a total of 10 weeks studying for the MCAT, immediately after I graduated from undergrad. My original plan was to spend the first half of those 10 weeks doing content review, and the second half focusing on questions.

I got the Kaplan 7 book set, and I got to studying, and I took very very detailed notes on each of those chapters. However, when I took my very first diagnostic test in my third week of studying, I realized I was reading all the information from the content review books, but not really retaining it. In addition, because I was taking those detailed notes from each chapter of the review books, I was starting to fall behind on the schedule I made for myself, and I was taking me FAR too long to get through each chapter.

I thought taking notes would help me retain the information long term, but I was wrong. While I was reading the review books, I was too worried about whether I was retaining content then and there. And maybe taking notes helped me get the information into my short term memory, but I was not really retaining it.

So I changed my strategy.

I started reading the chapters I assigned myself for that day, but instead of taking notes, I did Anki cards relevant to that chapter (I made my own, but there are plenty of premade decks available if that’s not your cup of tea!), and followed up my content review with UWorld and AAMC Questions.

Bottom line: you have to trust that you will learn the content through doing your question banks and flashcards, instead of relying solely on reading from the prep books.

Of course, it is important to review the question banks that you do. You will not learn by simply clicking through, you have to review the questions you get wrong (and maybe even make flashcards corresponding to those wrong answers).

By incorporating these active learning methods in addition to my content review, though, helped me retain information for longer and ultimately helped me get a 519 on the real thing.

Of course, this advice is perhaps most applicable to those who are taking the MCAT while still in undergrad or close to the time when they’ve finished the premed prerequisites. If it’s been a while since you’ve graduated from undergrad or took the prereqs, then you probably would need to spend more time on content review. This piece of advice is not so much a “one size fits all” type of advice, but rather a reminder that we retain information best through active learning, versus passively reading content.

I still follow this advice when studying in medical school and when I took STEP 1—I tried to incorporate as many practice problems as possible while balancing filling in the gaps in my knowledge (through reading).

Hope this helps–and happy studying!