MCAT Prep Lies The Internet Told Me: Pursuit of Practice Podcast

Bilal: So for a lot of students that void their exams, which is you take your exam but you realize, hey, I didn’t do really well on this, they void the exam. The AAMC still scores them. They don’t give you the score, but they still score them. And the average voided MCAT is a higher score than the average scored MCAT, which means that a lot of folks that did well voided their exams because they got anxious about the exam.

Pooja: The path to becoming a doctor is a whole range of things: exciting, confusing, anxiety-inducing, and gratifying, probably all at the same time. And the truth is that no matter how isolating it may feel, you’re not in it alone. Welcome to Pursuit of Practice, your go-to space for expert advice, real stories, and the kind of support that shows you what trusting the process actually looks like.

Welcome back, everybody, to Pursuit of Practice. I’m Pooja Sankar, your host. And for everyone who’s in the thick of MCAT prep right now, this episode is for you. Whether you’re studying between shifts, retaking after a score you weren’t proud of, or just feeling completely overwhelmed by the pressure, we see you. Today, we’re getting real about what it actually takes to get through MCAT prep, emotionally and strategically, and why if you’re struggling right now, that’s totally okay.

Today, I’m joined by Bilal Pandit, who has been an instructor with Blueprint for 3 years. He went to UCLA and got a degree in physiological sciences and is now a healthcare consultant. He’s been described as an enthusiastic and encouraging instructor who wants the best for his students. And on top of all of that, he’s training for an Iron Man, which he’s taking in 6 weeks. Bilal, thank you for joining us.

Bilal: Happy to be here.

Pooja: So, Bilal, you’ve been tutoring for the MCAT for 3 years. What types of students do you typically work with? And what are the challenges that you’ve seen people face while balancing the MCAT with work or school?

Bilal: I see a pretty big mix of students that are working, that are traditional, that are non-traditional. I think in general, especially as time has gone on, I see less of the, I’m going to study during my summer break and not have any other responsibilities, and more of the I’m working or I’m in school, and I’m going to have slightly longer prep to study over a longer period of hours. So, I think that there’s definitely been a shift, at least in the 3 years that I’ve been teaching, towards more of balancing the MCAT as part of your life as opposed to having it be your end all, be all for a couple months.

Pooja: Yeah. Yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense. And it’s something that I definitely think I’ve noticed too. Just for our listener’s perspective, what was your journey in that? Were you working? Were you taking it during the summer break? What was your journey like when you were studying for the MCAT?

Bilal: Yeah, so I kind of did a mix in the sense of my school, so I did take it during the summer between my 3rd and 4th years of undergrad, but I was also working during that summer. So, it was a summer prep, but I had kind of the first month and the last month as my months to study, and then I was kind of working in the middle of the 3 months. So overall, my prep took somewhere about, I think, 5 months, and 3 of the months of those 5 I was working.

Pooja: Okay. So it sounds like for a majority of the time, at least 60% of the time that you were studying, you were balancing it with something else.

Bilal: Yeah.

How was that for you? Did you find it difficult to balance that at the same time? It sounds like it was hard.

Bilal: Yeah, it’s it’s definitely challenging. And I was working for UCLA football, which meant I had to wake up at like 5 in the morning to show up to practices, which was not conducive to having good sleep at all, which is not really a good idea. But I think the transition point, like the first week, first week or 2 was really, really hard. But I think the big thing that I learned throughout kind of the start of that is learning to schedule time, because I think it can be really easy to just say, oh yeah, I’m going to get home at like 3:00 p.m. and I’m going to study for 2 hours, and then I’m going to eat, and then I’m going to study for 2 hours and like put like blanket study blocks.

But often times, at least for me, when I put those blanket study blocks, I didn’t do as much as I wanted to do, and I was like perpetually behind. And so I started to set like concrete goals for what I wanted to hit in every hour. So for example, I was like, okay, I get home at 3:00. From 3:00 to 4:00, I’m going to do a module. From 4:00 to 5:00, I’m going to do two CARS passages and a science passage. And like setting concrete goals in every hour that I was studying throughout every week made it so that I knew, like realistically, what can I actually do, and then I have a plan to actually finish what I think I can realistically do.

Pooja: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So transitioning from just giving yourself blanket periods of time to actual actionable tasks and a more concrete to-do list seems to have been what allowed you to create that balance for yourself.

Bilal: Yeah, exactly.

Pooja: Okay, that makes a lot of sense. And do you find that your experience juggling work and studying allows you to help other people as they’re going through the same thing themselves?

Bilal: Yeah, I mean, I think at the end of the day, everyone’s everyone’s relationship with their work and school is going to be different, right? Some people are going to be working more hours, some of you are going to be working less. Some are going to have like an easy quarter for school, some are going to have a really busy quarter for school. So I think it does help me give perspective, but at the end of the day, it’s all about working with the student and understanding, hey, what is your situation?

Obviously, I have insight from my own situation, but my method works for me, but it doesn’t necessarily work for other people. And I’m not a big fan of saying, oh yeah, I was working during my prep so I understand everyone else that’s working during prep, right? Everyone has their own unique set of circumstances, and I have some insight, but at the end of the day, it’s all about having those conversations and understanding what is and isn’t feasible.

Pooja: No, that makes a lot of sense. And I guess globally, I know you just said that you believe in adapting everything to everyone’s unique circumstances, but for any listener who feels like they’re struggling with that themselves, is there any advice that you’d recommend giving them so that they can figure out what works best for them?

Bilal: Yeah, I think the big thing is making sure that you’re being realistic about your study plan and developing something that you can maintain with consistency. I think one of the biggest issues that I see when it comes to, especially starting off someone with MCAT prep is they want to do everything immediately, right? Like day 1, they’re studying for 7 hours, they’re studying until they can’t study anymore, and they’re planning to do that for 3 months. And when you have that volume of stuff that you need to do, you can do it for a day, you can do it for 3 days, maybe you do it for a week, but at an eventual point, you’re going to be like, hey, I’m sleeping 4 hours a night, I’m working 8 hours, and I’m coming home and studying for 8 hours. I cannot do this for 3 months.

And then you end up with burnout, and now you’re in basically like a worse place than you were initially. And so the big thing that you want to focus on when you’re creating your prep is, hey, it’s not just about doing as much as you possibly can, right? It’s a marathon, not a sprint. How can I set up my study plan so this is something that I can not only do this week, but I can do next week and the week after and for 12 subsequent weeks?

So, set yourself up for consistency by starting small and building up, right? It’s, at least for me, especially with the pre-meds that I’ve worked with, it’s always easier to add more work than to remove work. Because folks are not a fan of admitting defeat, right? Where they’re like, oh, I wasn’t able to do this, which means it’s my fault, it’s my bad, I did something wrong. It’s like, no, you just realistically didn’t have time, and that’s completely okay. So at least in my experience, like starting small and slowly building your way up is a way that I found to kind of navigate that very well.

Pooja: Yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense. And it sounds like you had your fair share of difficulties balancing all of that yourself. And I want to talk about burnout in a little bit, because I want to circle back to that. I think that’s a whole important conversation that we should have. But in terms of your own journey, did you find that you had the rhythm and the, I guess, intensity of which you wanted to study figured out at the beginning, or did you feel like you had to make some adjustments over your 5 months of studying?

Bilal: I don’t know if I ever truly figured it out. I just kind of just like played it by ear. And I think I think obviously like improvement is what I was what I can say that happened. I don’t want to say that I was perfect by any stretch of the imagination, that I was doing exactly what I wanted to do, but I think over the course of my prep, I was able to stay more focused for longer periods of time and be able to do the work that I had set out in my for myself.

Because for the folks that aren’t aware, the MCAT is like a 7-hour exam, right? It is very, very long. And one of the big things is building up stamina to take that exam, right? And it’s it’s not just applicable for your MCAT, but it’s applicable for your step exams and your board exams and you’re you’re going to have a ton of really long exams in the future. And I’m sure you can you can attest to that.

Pooja: Yeah.

Bilal: But the key thing is like showing progression over time. Yeah, some people are going to have like amazing study habits and like study hygiene like the first day, and you’re like, okay, like credit to you. But focus on improving your own ability to stay focused and like limit your phone usage and like make sure you’re setting aside study blocks and prioritizing your study time. I think things like that really add up over the course of the prep.

Pooja: No, absolutely. Absolutely. And I want to also appreciate something that you said, which is that you don’t always have to have it figured out in the beginning, and that it’s more than okay to just be happy with progress that you make as opposed to saying, “Oh, I was able to study for 8 hours on like my 2nd day of studying. Look at me go.” That’s not the progress that you necessarily need to be looking at. It’s about how you’re able to work within the time that you have and be kind. Being kind to yourself along the way sounds like it’s super important too.

Bilal: Yeah. I think it’s it’s very much like quality of your studying is going to matter a lot more than the quantity in a lot of cases, right? Just because you study for 8 hours doesn’t mean it’s better than someone that studied for 5 hours because they could have been more focused in their work rather than you just starting to zone out for the last 4 hours.

Pooja: Yeah, absolutely. And I appreciate you mentioning the time too, because I feel like there are a lot of myths around the MCAT, and I feel like one of the ones that I’ve heard is that you have to study for a certain amount of hours every single day in order to get the score that you want. I wonder if there are any myths that you feel like you’ve encountered most often. And if you have any takes on them that you just want to bust right now while we’re here.

Bilal: I think the most common myth that I see and this starts to come especially close as folks get closer to their test day, which is like, if I don’t feel ready for my exam, like I shouldn’t take it. And it’s this idea of like anyone that did really well on their exam felt super prepared and ready for their exam. They were like, oh, I’m locked in, this is going to be easy. I’ve killed all these exams, it’s going to be easy. I’m just going to show up, kill this exam and go home. But at least for me, I woke up at like 3:30 in the morning the night of my exam.

I woke up at like 3:30 in the morning, I’m pulling out a piece of paper, I’m like writing out the thin like the thin lens equation, I’m like Googling what the lens maker equation is. I’m like panicking. And I didn’t even get a lens maker equation on my exam, which I was like kind of mad about. But I did all of that, and I ended up scoring pretty well, right? And so it wasn’t a factor of like, I didn’t feel totally ready for my exam, but it’s more so looking at like, hey, I’ve done this in the past couple of weeks, I’ve done this in my full lengths. This is my full length progression.

At the end of the day, the MCAT is a standardized exam. And that essentially means that how well you’ve been doing on your past exams is going to pretty closely mirror what you’re going to feel on test day. Obviously, you’re going to have like some level of score fluctuation, right? But you go online, you see people getting like 10 points higher than their last full length or 10 points lower than their last full length. And those are very much the exceptions to the norm, right? The majority of people are going to score within around where they were scoring on their last exam. And so as long as you are hitting that, I think that is going to be kind of your source of readiness.

Pooja: Yeah, no, that is super helpful because I feel like a lot of people either hear that they’re going to do significantly better or significantly worse. I’m glad I’m glad that we got to dispel that a little bit. Are there any other like takes that you’ve seen that you want to talk about? I know that one of the things that we’ve spoken about is about whether or not the MCAT is a natural skill or not and how some people think that they’re either naturally good or naturally bad. What are your thoughts on that type of thinking?

Bilal: Yeah, and I think that there is a basis of truth, but I also think it’s a self-defeating myth.

Pooja: Yeah.

Bilal: In the sense of you see some people will score like a 505 on their diagnostic, and some people will score like a 490 on their diagnostic. And often times students will see that and they’ll be like, “Oh, this student is just better than me, right? They’re just going to do better on the MCAT because they had a better starting point than me.” But that’s not always necessarily true because I’ve worked with students that have done really well in their diagnostic and not seen the progression that you would expect. And vice versa, I’ve seen students that struggle a ton in their diagnostic and then ended up doing much, much better.

And I very much fall into that latter group. I scored in the 480s, like the low 480s for my first diagnostic. And this was like 2 and 1/2 months out, and I was like, “I’m cooked.” There’s no hope for me. There’s no hope for me. But it ended up being okay. But the idea that you have to score well on your first ever exam to have a good outcome is just not true for 99% of students because you’re basically never going to do well on your first exam, right? There’s always going to be a learning curve to that.

Pooja: Right. No, absolutely. And I also appreciate you being forthcoming about your diagnostic score because I think that’s the one thing that I feel like I was told all the time when I was teaching classes is that, “Oh, I got the score on my diagnostic. Am I, am I cooked?” And the truth is, no, you’re not. A starting point is just that, just a starting point, and you can go, you could either like coast and not go up super high, or you can make tremendous gains, and all of it is up to you, right? Everyone has that power to make the changes. And it seems like you were able to do that, which is great.

Bilal: Yeah, it was always a point of almost embarrassment for me, especially when I first started teaching where I was like, “Dang, I don’t want people to know that I was that bad at the exam when I started off,” because you want to present this image of, “Oh yeah, I walked in, I came out the womb, I was scoring a 520.” I know no adversity here. I’m just built different, right? But I think students can relate when they understand that, oh, it’s okay to do bad on your diagnostic, right? It’s not it’s not a reflection of who you are or how smart you are or anything like that. It’s just a data point more than anything else.

Pooja: Yeah, no, if anything, I feel like it is better if you do worse and then are able to overcome that, because it adds to your character arc. But I think it also contributes to your own development as a student and as a learner because the truth is that the MCAT is one of many exams that you’re going to have to take. And I think if you develop that ability to realize what your strengths and weaknesses are and grow from them, it only serves you well as you take subsequent exams. So that’s amazing.

Another myth that I’ve heard about that I wanted to talk to you about is about like the scores that you need to get to get into med school. And I know that, obviously, we’re not the experts on admissions or anything, but what are your thoughts about when people say that, “Oh, a 515 is the bare minimum?” Like what are your thoughts about those types of myths and rumors?

Bilal: I think the this is like a very good example of selection bias, right? Like especially if you go online and you look up like Reddit or SDN for like MCAT scores, people are either scoring like 520 plus or like 490s and below, right? It’s very like bimodal, right? Because that people want to share the extremes. And I think because of that, there’s this perception of, oh, I have to basically get a 515, otherwise, I’m not going to get into medical school, right? That’s like the bare minimum that I have to get to have any possibility of success.

But if you dive in a little bit deeper, right, and you look at the actual published statistics from AMCAS, I think it’s AMSTAR, I think the average MCAT score for an MD matriculant, right, not even an applicant is like a 511. And that’s kind of the average, which means that 50% of the folks are scoring below a 511 and still getting in. And then you also have a large chunk of folks that are doing better and also getting in, right? And I have had students and I’ve personally had friends as well that have scored worse than that and still gotten into very good medical schools.

So, I don’t think it’s necessarily like an end all, be all. Is it going to help you to get a higher MCAT score? I’m not going to lie to you. Yes, it will. But is that going to be the determiner of like, oh, I got a 520 plus, I basically just need to show up and like write an application, they’re going to immediately get on their knees and beg for me? Also no, right? It is very much a holistic process. It’s great to have one really strong data point, but at the end of the day, you have to have the rest of it strong as well, and you can compensate for that lower MCAT score if you need to.

Pooja: No, absolutely. And I appreciate that you’re saying that. And what I love about it is that it removes some of the pressure. I feel like there are so many students out there who feel like the MCAT is the thing that is going to get them into medical school, or is the thing that will prevent them from getting into medical school. And so they put a lot of pressure on it. But I hope that for our listeners, you take this as a moment to remove that pressure because this is just a part of your application. It’s not the entire thing, and there are ways to navigate and kind of deal with a low score if that happens. But again, we don’t think that’s going to happen to you. But we it’s important to know that there are other ways to navigate low scores.

Bilal: Yeah, and I think kind of speaking on that, I think one of the other myths is kind of related to that idea of like pressure and like performance is like, I think a lot of students picture their test day as like, they’re like NBA finals, game 7, their Super Bowl, right? Like they have to go out, they have to drop like 60 points, put on like a Michael Jordan performance to do super well on their exam, right?

Pooja: Yeah.

Bilal: But the important thing to recognize is, the MCAT is a standardized exam. What you got in your past is what you’re going to get now, and your main responsibility for test day is just showing up, right? You don’t have to do anything drastically different. You shouldn’t do anything drastically different. I know it can feel like there’s a lot of pressure on you and that you have to go in, you have to perform. But the big thing about the MCAT is you just need to show up, right? Everything that you’ve done in the past is what’s going to pay off now, right?

And you can think about it as marathon training because I’m in the bulk of that, where if you run for 8, 9 months, right? You are going to be prepared for your race on race day, right? That’s going to be the biggest factor, even if you don’t necessarily feel great heading into your race. If you’ve done all of the work beforehand and you have that base build up, you’re going to be able to perform even if you don’t mentally feel like you’re immediately going to be there.

Pooja: Absolutely. Like, I think people say trust the process a lot, and I feel like this is very much in line with that line of advice. So I want to transition into a different topic, and it kind of circles back on what you had mentioned earlier about burnout. Burnout is common, not only during MCAT prep but also during undergraduate studies, people who are doing gap years or do post-bac programs or when they’re in medical school. For you, I want to ask before we talk about recognizing it in other people, have you ever experienced burnout yourself?

Bilal: When have I not? I feel like burnout is like an inevitable step in like every pre-med’s journey at some point or another, whether it’s the MCAT, whether it’s something else. I think it’s it’s something that kind of happens regardless of the situation that you’re placed in because we just have like a ton of stuff to get through, whether it’s course work, whether it’s this exam, there’s just so much stuff going on that there is always eventually going to be a time and point where you put too much on your plate and you’re not able to break it all down.

Pooja: Yeah. What is your journey with burnout been like? Tell us more about that.

Bilal: Yeah, so I mean, I think when it comes to the context of studying itself, I think the burnout that I felt that was most pronounced was definitely in like the latter half of my MCAT prep when I was still working. So I had like 3 weeks after work ended where I could kind of study full-time, and that wasn’t as bad. But especially like the last 3 weeks of work while I was still studying was brutal. And I think some of the things that come with burnout is, the biggest thing for me was the guilt.

In the sense of like it’s not just like I didn’t feel mentally ready to study, it’s also I felt bad for not being mentally ready to study. And then I would just feel bad for myself, I would still not study, and then I would feel extra bad that I was feeling bad and still feeling bad enough to not study. It was just like a self-fulfilling cycle of just feeling bad and not getting anything done. And I think a lot of students feel that in the sense of there’s just there’s a lot of pressure to like the MCAT should be the only thing in your life. Forget your friends, forget hanging out, forget doing anything fun. This is MCAT time.

And while I think that there is a time and place for that, it’s also important to recognize that doing things outside of the MCAT is equally important to your MCAT prep as doing stuff for your MCAT, right? You want to make sure that you’re able to spend time disconnecting from the exam, right? And spending time with your friends and going out and like eating a meal or watching a movie or like doing something that where you’re not constantly thinking about the MCAT, and those mental resets can do wonders for your ability to focus, right? Because you can’t be fully switched on unless you have periods where you’re fully switched off.

Pooja: That makes a lot of sense. And I think there’s even a scientific basis to that too. I remember, I would tell my students that neurologically speaking, our brains need time to rest. Otherwise, it’s not going to consolidate what we’ve learned. And so, I think what you’re saying about having time away from that allows your mind to rest a little bit and consolidate everything that you’ve learned and allow yourself to engage in spaced repetition and all these other evidence-based techniques for learning that we learn about.

Now, in terms of the cycle that you talked about, you had mentioned this positive feedback cycle where you feel bad about studying, and then you don’t study because you’re feeling bad, and then you feel even worse. How did you break that cycle?

Bilal: It was something that just came with time in the sense of like, I think it was very, very difficult. But I think eventually at one point I was like, “Hey, I’m just going to take today completely off.” I’m going to have like a reset. I’m not going to do some like half-baked studying for like 2 hours and then like pretend like I’m actually doing work when I’m not. I’m just going to fully take one day off, and then I’m going to go and like attack it tomorrow. This is the study plan that I’m going to make sure that I’m hitting. These are the hours that I’m going to be doing. This is something that’s going to be sustainable for me. Maybe I reduced, I think I reduced my workload a little bit because I knew I was like, I’m going to be done with work in like 2 and 1/2 weeks. So let me just reduce the workload so that I can kick it back up in a couple weeks so I can get a little bit of rest and recovery over the next couple of weeks before I kind of like hit the road running.

Pooja: Yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense. And I feel like I’ve from what I’m hearing, it sounds like as opposed to studying for the sake of studying, taking that intentional, like I’m going to break the cycle of feeling bad about taking a break and actually giving myself that time intentionally. And that seems to be a way to stop that cycle, at least a little bit.

Bilal: Yeah. And I’ve worked with students that have experienced things that are similar. Like I worked with a student last year that was studying for the MCAT as a traditional student and was basically working or like was studying full-time. And so they were studying like 5, 6, 7 hours a day depending on the day and their full length and all that stuff. And so they’re like basically constantly working, and I think their prep was somewhere like it was like 2 and 1/2 months into their prep. And they had plateaued on like two exams. They were getting super, super frustrated. They were like, “This sucks. I’m putting in so many hours, but why is it not paying off?” And the fact that it wasn’t paying off made it even more stressful that you’re like, “Oh my god, I’ve spent so much time. What if I’m not ready in like a month and a half when I’m testing?” And it’s like, it just becomes this like self-fulfilling prophecy.

And so eventually I told them like, “Hey, maybe just take some time away, right? Maybe just take like a minute or like a day or 2 to like reset, and then we can kind of come back and like reorient instead of you just like crawling to the finish line over the next month and a half and just like feeling like death the entire time.”

Pooja: No, absolutely.

Bilal: And so they took like a like a 3 or 4-day like weekend trip somewhere. There was no MCAT. They just like hung out with their friends for like a weekend. They came back, they did a little bit of studying throughout the week. They took an exam that week, and they got like a 4 or 5 point increase.

Pooja: Oh, wow.

Bilal: Right? And it’s like, okay, well now we know that it’s not just necessarily like how much you do, but also like how you feel, right? The mentality that you have approaching these exams and being stressed and anxious isn’t doing wonders for your performance, right? There’s there’s something in the psych section of the MCAT called the Yerkes-Dodson law, right? Where it’s the idea that like you want to reach the state of optimal arousal, right? Where you do want to be a little bit stressed. The MCAT is important, you do want to be a little bit stressed because if you’re not stressed at all, you like fall asleep during your exam. But then on the flip side, if you’re too stressed, you’re going to do worse than you would normally, right? So you want to find that middle ground where you are having a little bit of stress, but it’s not to the point where it’s preventing you from performing and doing the things that you want to do.

Pooja: Absolutely. No, I love me a good Yerkes-Dodson law. I’m glad I’m glad you brought it up in this context.

Bilal: The MCAT instructor always peeks its face a little bit.

Pooja: Absolutely. So we talked a lot about burnout. We talked a lot about breaking it. Are there any early signs of burnout that students should watch out for and should take as their opportunity to say, “Okay, let me take some time away. Let me intentionally give myself that break so that I don’t end up completely burnt out?”

Bilal: Yeah, I think it’s it’s always this balance of like, am I burnt out or am I being lazy? You know, like, am I actually burnt out and tired or am I just like sick of the exam, and I don’t want to study anymore? And I think it comes back to that idea of like start small and build up, right? When you start off with like 7 hours of prep every single day, well, then you might just be tired of the exam or you might be really burnt out. It’s hard to kind of parse that out. And that’s why I find starting small and building up is a much better approach because let’s say you’re studying 4 hours and you’re like, “Hey, I feel fine. This is totally sustainable.”

You go up to 5, you’re like, “Okay, this is fine. It’s a little rough, but it’s okay.” And then you get to 6, and you’re like, “This sucks. I feel awful. I’m not looking forward to studying at all. I’m not able to remember any of the things that I’m studying.” You’re like, “Okay, well then clearly this 6-hour mark is too low. I need to taper it back.” So, by kind of progressing throughout your studying, it becomes a lot easier to identify burnout than if you just like throw everything at the wall and then try to work backward and try to fix it once you’ve already like gone too far, right? It’s always easier to progress upward than to taper back.

Pooja: Yeah. No, that makes sense. So slow and steady seems to be the name of the game for this marathon of an exam.

Bilal: Exactly.

Pooja: Amazing. So, Bilal, you mentioned that baselines aren’t the end all, be all, right? That even if you have a low score, you can still get to a much higher score, if not the score of your dreams. And I want to expand on that a little bit. How did you use your baseline score to guide your subsequent studying?

Bilal: Yeah, I don’t know if this is like a controversial opinion, but I really don’t think that your baseline matters. And the reason I don’t think your baseline matters is I think that there’s just so many confounding factors in like taking your first exam.

Pooja: Yeah.

Bilal: That the score doesn’t mean much, right? Because I’ve worked with students that have done really poorly on their diagnostic, but it’s because they ran out of stamina. They just weren’t able to focus in the last two sections, right? Or they just got super, super tired, or maybe they just like they weren’t used to sitting at their computer for that long, and they started to get like uncomfortable and they started like not being able to focus on the material, or their eyes started glazing over and they weren’t able to read passages.

There are so many factors that are at play when it comes to that first exam that I really don’t see a ton of value in like saying, “Oh yeah, I scored X, Y, Z on my first exam. That means that I’m on track to score whatever.” You could score a great score on your first exam and stay at that great score. You could score a great score and then get worse over time. There are so many fluctuations that happen because it’s a baseline, right?

So it’s more so about the progression from there as opposed to like that baseline as a data point. If you think about a graph, if you have one data point, it’s not a line, it’s just a point. Right? You have to have multiple points to be able to say, hey, here’s a trend. So just because you do very poorly or you do very well isn’t going to be a guaranteed indicator of your future progression.

Pooja: Right. Right. So it sounds like the trend that you make from your initial exam is important, but also how you subjectively feel. So if you find that one thing you weren’t used to was not being able to sit at your computer for 8 hours, that is a point that you should realize about yourself and figure out if there are any ways that you can improve that specific point. Does that sound right to you?

Bilal: Exactly. And I think even to add on to that, I think even your first like 2 or 3 exams can be often not super indicative of progression. Because a very common theme that I’ll see across students is they’ll take their first 2 or 3 exams, and they’ll score kind of the same. Like they’ll be like a couple of point fluctuations, but there’s not going to be like a huge change. And a lot of students immediately jump to like, “Oh, I’ve plateaued. I’m stuck. I haven’t seen any progression. I’m basically in the same place I was a couple months ago.”

But that’s not necessarily true. And the reason being is the MCAT tests a lot of topics. Yeah. Right? And especially early on in your prep, you’re going to have gaps in content that you’re good at and content that you’re not as good at. So for example, let’s say your first exam, you got a electrostatics passage, and you’re like, “Okay, I know that I got tested on electrostatics. I am now an electrostatics pro.” And then you head into your second exam, you don’t get a single electrostatics questions, you get a ton of torque questions, and you’re like, “Dang it.”

Right? Your overall score stayed the same, but you got much better at a topic. And then you study torque, you know torque like the back of your hand. You’re like, “Okay, I know torque, electrostatics, I’m ready.” You head into your third exam and a test kinematics, you’re like, “God, why am I so unlucky?” And you have the same score in the chem section, but then you now know your forces and kinematics really well. You head into your fourth exam, then you get electrostatics, torque, and kinematics, you nail them, and now you have a huge score increase.

Right? It’s not that you did anything super special in the week before that exam that led to that score increase, it’s that because the MCAT tests so much, it can often take a long time to see that translate to a score increase.

Pooja: Right. Right. It’s like if each exam is a sample of what you know, you have to cover enough information that any random sample also overlaps efficiently with what you know.

Bilal: It’s it’s like a Venn diagram, right? Each of your full lengths is like its own little Venn diagram. There’s always going to be those overlapping sections. The more exams you take, the more questions you do, the more overlap there’s going to be until eventually hopefully everything is overlapping because you’ve seen everything at least once.

Pooja: No, yeah, absolutely. That’s that’s the goal. In terms of the first couple of practice tests though, what is there any data that you think people can use from that? Like either specific question types, timing, or specific topics that people can use to inform their study after taking that practice test? Is there anything you think people can use or no?

Bilal: I think when it comes to the first exam, generally, I will use the first exam as like a touch point for understanding what topics folks are naturally better at and worse at. So for example, like a lot of students will do much better in like bio than biochem. And so if I see a student that’s scored whatever they scored but they did very well in bio and really poorly in biochem, it’s like, okay, cool. Not necessarily like you don’t need to focus on bio at all, but it’s like, hey, clearly biochem is a weakness. So let’s make sure we’re making sure we’re doing a ton of questions about biochem.

Or like gen chem and physics, a lot of folks struggle with physics. It’s like, okay, well clearly physics is a weak point. Let’s make sure we incorporate some extra questions about physics in the next couple of months. So it’s it’s more about just like, hey, these are what you’re preferentially good or bad at, which most students are honestly already aware of before even taking the exam. But it’s just a data point validating their pre-existing notions of what they are good and not good at.

Pooja: Totally.

Bilal: The other thing that I will look at, and this is generally in later exams, is like progressions across topics. Okay. And this kind of goes back to the earlier point where if I see a student that is struggling a lot on electrostatics in their first exam, it’s not a huge red flag for me. I’m like, “Okay, cool. You have a weak point. You can go figure it out. We can address it and then we can move on.”

But if I see a student that’s scoring poorly in electrostatics full length 1, full length 2, full length 3, full length 4, and then I’m like, okay, now let’s let’s walk it back. Let’s figure out like what exactly is going wrong because clearly something is going wrong in your process of addressing your weaknesses because this mistake is constant. And that’s a much bigger red flag for me than like, oh, their score stayed at a 125. I’m like, “Okay, that’s that’s fine. That doesn’t mean that you’re not progressing.” But if you are scoring the same on a series of topics that you’ve reviewed across your exams, that’s a much bigger red flag for me.

Pooja: That makes a lot of sense. So really paying attention to not just the score but also what topics are being addressed and whether or not you’ve made improvements in those topics if you’ve already studied them before.

Bilal: Exactly.

Pooja: So, seems like you’re very data-driven, not just by our conversation, but also the fact that you are a consultant now, which I’m assuming you use a lot of data. I don’t know exactly what I don’t know exactly what consultants do to be honest, but I know that there’s data involved. I wonder in your own personal journey of studying for this exam, how did you use data that you got from practice tests and practice questions in your own studying?

Bilal: Yeah, it’s it’s kind of an ongoing joke that nobody really knows what consultants do. It’s just like a an ambiguous role. But coming back to the idea of analytics and data, I think one of the big things that I would strongly recommend students to do is especially focusing on their review, right? In the sense of your review gives you a lot of data about what you’re good and what you’re bad at. And as I continued taking my exams, I would really focus on understanding all of the questions that I got wrong.

And so at the end of the day, after reviewing my full lengths, I would have like a to-do list of things that I would need to hit to make sure that I was able to see improvement on the next exam. Because I think a common misconception students have is like, oh, taking more full lengths is better, right? If I just take more full lengths, I’ll see an increase. I’ll just take a full length every 3 days. But it’s less about taking the full length, and it’s more about what you do between the full lengths, right?

So, for example, if you struggle on electrostatics on a first full length and then you just take another full length 2 days later, you’re still going to get that same electrostatics question wrong, right? You have to make sure that you’re doing something in that gap to address your weaknesses. And so creating like actionable to-do lists of things that you’re actually going to do to address all of your issues is going to be huge in terms of that progression.

Pooja: Yeah, no, absolutely. I love that. And I also again, maybe it’s the consultant in you, I don’t know. But I feel like having individualized data that you’re able to track and then use to inform your subsequent decision-making, I think it’s not only important for the MCAT but also for future tests. I know that I used it a ton. I use a lot of the study techniques that I built when I was studying for the MCAT and when I taught MCAT classes when I was studying for step. It’s something that doesn’t go away. The idea of just like making sure that you are addressing actual weaknesses that you have versus ambiguously going through an entire plan or an entire textbook because you feel like you have to.

So now I want to transition a little bit into retaking or moving test date. I don’t know if you ended up moving your test date at all or if you have any experience with that yourself.

Bilal: So I did move my test date, but it wasn’t a dramatic change. It’s it’s a bit of a funny story. So I was supposed to test at the end of August, and I’m in I was in L.A. at the time, and so I was planning on testing in Torrance. And I ended up shifting my test date.

Pooja: I don’t know where Torrance is.

Bilal: It’s like a little bit south of L.A.

Pooja: Sure, okay.

Bilal: And I ended up shifting my test date to be like 3 weeks or 2 weeks later because I didn’t feel super ready at like the 1-month mark, which is when you can generally reschedule, which is like 30 days out. And the test center that I was supposed to test at on the date that I was supposed to test at had a power outage. So the entire test center had a power outage, and they had to reschedule everyone to like some later point in like in January or like December. And I was like, “Oh my God, if that happened to me, I would be so upset.” But I did reschedule my exam, and it was it was okay.

Pooja: Okay, wow. So yeah, you were fated to move your exam it sounds like.

Bilal: Exactly.

Pooja: Wow, that’s that’s crazy. I feel so bad for all the people who that happened to them. Hopefully it doesn’t happen to any of any of you guys. But yeah, that’s that’s super unfortunate. In terms of your decision to move your test date though, you mentioned that a month out, you felt like you weren’t ready. Tell me a little bit more about that. What made you feel that you weren’t ready?

Bilal: Yeah, so I think at least for me, it was hard for me to judge how ready I felt mostly because I think I mentioned that I was working a lot in like those 3 months, and I wasn’t really seeing the score progression that I wanted. And I think that there were a couple of exams that were kind of the same, and then I had a little bit of a dip. So like my score progression was like, I started off low, I went up, and then I had like the same score for two exams, and then I went up, and then I had the same score for two exams, and then I went down.

And then when I went down, I was like, “Oh no, I need to push, I need to push, I need to push.” I think I realistically might have been okay, but I think the anxiety really, really got to me, especially when I saw the score decrease where I was like, “Oh, I dropped like 3 points from my last exam. If this continues, what if I’m down like 9 points by the time I take my exam in like 3 weeks?” And so I ended up pushing my exam 2 weeks to kind of give myself the most amount of flexibility because I was testing in the summer, and one of the downsides of testing in the summer is you have to test in September. If you can’t push it later than September up until January.

So if you’re like one of the January test takers, like you can push from January to February, February to March, March to April, like you can shift basically any time point you want. But if you’re one of the summer test takers, the last test date is the 2nd week of September. If you don’t test there, you’re not testing until the next year.

Pooja: Yeah. Yeah. So it sounds like a lot of factors that kind of play into moving your test date and when you can move it to, not only your own individualized readiness, your score trajectory, but also the time of year that you’re in and whether or not it’s feasible to move it back a couple weeks if that’s what you prefer. Are there any other factors that you think are important to consider when moving your test date?

Bilal: Yeah, I mean, I think the biggest factor is, are you actually going to be able to study in the time that you have? Because I think a lot of students think like, “Oh, I’ll just postpone my exam. More time is better.” And especially for the September test takers, a lot of the students that I’ve worked with that are testing in September are students that are in school, right? That’s kind of like a very common like school study date because you have the summer to study, and then you head back into school in like September, October.

And one of the issues is, okay, let’s say we push from September to January, now you’re going to have to study while you’re in school. And are you actually going to be able to spend time studying in school? Because for a lot of students, they aren’t able to manage school as well as the MCAT or maybe they have like a big course load and they aren’t able to get to studying for the MCAT. Well, they might be in a worse position in January than they were in September because they’ve basically lost time by not studying for those 3 months.

Pooja: Right.

Bilal: So it’s it’s a matter of yes, you want to make sure that more time can be better, but you want to make sure that you create a realistic plan of like, “Hey, if I’m pushing my exam, this is how much time I’m going to have to study.” The general ballpark that I’ll give for students is like you want to aim for about like in the in the interest of data, the you want to aim for about like 300 to 350 hours for your prep. Right? And if you end up pushing your exam, you want to aim for an additional like 150 to 200 hours of studying after you push it.

And so if you look at the 200 hours and you’re like, there’s no way I’m going to be able to spend 10 hours a week for that many weeks. It’s like, okay, well then maybe pushing your exam isn’t the best idea. Or maybe you want to regroup at a later point. Because at least in my experience, if at least from what I found is like 15 hours is like the baseline per week that I found is sufficient to keep all of your knowledge fresh if not see a little bit of progression.

Pooja: Right. Okay.

Bilal: If you study for like 6, 7 hours a week, I found in my experience, you’re probably going to forget a fair amount, and you’re not going to be able to like maintain where you were. 15 hours is like the bare minimum in my experience for maintenance of just kind of keeping pace with where you are.

Pooja: Also, I feel like it kind of comes to the point of test taking that it’s not just about knowledge, it’s about keeping the knowledge in your head for the amount of time that you’re taking it, and also the skills that are associated with taking these exams. Like the endurance alone, I think, can be hard to sustain over the course of months if you’re trying to push your test date that much. And so being realistic about the skills and maintaining the knowledge base to the point where you can increase it and not just like lose information as you’re learning it, I think is super important too.

So one thing that students encounter all the time, and I’m sure you did too, I know I definitely did, was I did not feel ready for my test when my test date came around. I think you mentioned it too, that like you didn’t feel the most confident. How do you balance confidence in your test date versus ensuring that you’ve had enough time and being able to trust what you’ve done going into your exam?

Bilal: Yeah, and this is where that data is going to come more into play than really anything else, right? Generally, when you’re a month out, I tend to be a little bit more conservative than a lot of folks, but I say like, in a month out, you should be within 4 to 6 points of where you want to be, right? So if your goal score is a 515, you want to be in like the high 500s, like 509 plus to feel confident about testing in a month. If you are have a goal score of a 500, and you’re scoring let’s say a 498, well then I would strongly consider rescheduling.

So it’s more so a factor of like the data presented than anything else because I think how you feel can be subjective, and it can change very easily, right? A great example of this, and I’m sure you’ve had exams like this where you take the exam, and you feel like the exam was horrible. You finished this exam, and you’re like, “That was the worst exam I’ve ever taken.” And then you get your score, and you did really well, and you’re like, “Oh, maybe that exam wasn’t that bad. That exam was not that bad,” you know?

And so how you feel about an exam can change drastically based on how you feel like you did on the exam versus how you actually did on the exam. And so that’s why it tends to vary a lot, right? Even when you finish your actual exam and like you take your exam and you walk out of the test center, I did not feel great about my exam. I was like, “Oh, like am I actually going to have to retake this exam?” I had like a vivid picture of this like capacitor question that I was like, “Oh, dang it. I knew I should have gotten that capacitor question right.”

And so I think like even walking out of the test center, I did not feel great. And it ended up being okay. And there’s again, I’m going to throw a little bit of data at you to really hammer that home. The so for a lot of students that void their exam, which is you take your exam but you realize, “Hey, I didn’t do really well on this,” and they void the exam. The AAMC still scores them. They don’t give you the score, but they still score them. And the average voided MCAT is a higher score than the average scored MCAT.

Pooja: Oh my God, really?

Bilal: Which means that a lot of folks that did well voided their exams because they got anxious about the exam.

Pooja: Whoa, I did not know that. That is wild.

Bilal: Yeah. So that’s just like further evidence that like your mind plays tricks on you at all times basically.

Pooja: Wow, okay. Yeah. I mean, I think that goes to show that clearly voiding is not the move unless there’s like an actual emergency during your exam. But also that, our minds do play tricks on us. I think when I was studying for my board exams and I was taking my MCAT, I also did not feel great during it. But I remember someone had told me once that our brains remember bad memories easier than they remember good ones. And so during exams, we are more likely to remember the questions that we got stuck on or that we figured out that we got wrong more than the questions that we thought we got right because we didn’t spend as much of our brain or our mental energy thinking about that question because we knew the answer and then moved on really quickly versus the time that you spend agonizing over a question, you’re better able to remember it later when you’re thinking about the exam.

Bilal: Yeah, I think that carries over to like thinking about the yield of topics on the exam, right? Because a lot of students will take an exam, they’ll be like, “Dang, there was this O-chem mechanism question. I need to make sure I study like O-chem mechanisms in a ton of great detail.” And it’s like, yeah, there was one O-chem mechanism question, but there were 10 acid base questions that you got right, right? So just because you got a question, the questions that were hard for you tend to stand out in your mind, and that often ends up being a place that students focus on rather than all of the smaller pieces, right? And so a lot of students, if you look online, they’re like, “Oh, the MCAT has changed. They’re testing all these low-yield topics and like everything is so much harder now.” It’s like, the score distribution is a percentile, right? It doesn’t really matter what your raw score is, it’s based on how other people do.

Pooja: Yeah.

Bilal: And that exam is going to be difficult, yes, but you’re also focusing on the parts that you struggled on, right? If you did really well on 20 questions, exactly like Pooja mentioned, right, you’re not going to think about it. You’re just like, “Oh yeah, that’s fine.” But it’s the ones that you struggled on, you definitely focus on.

Pooja: Absolutely. And I think one last question I have about that specifically is if someone is studying for their exam and they’re not sure about pushing their test date back, how can people know if they’re truly ready?

Bilal: I think my recommendation for students that are always on the fence is to take an AAMC exam at the 30-day mark or like the 31-day mark before their exam because the 30-day mark is the last point at which you are able to reschedule. If you do it after the 30-day mark, you have to either void your exam or like no show or just cancel and you don’t get any money back and it’s basically the same thing as like voiding your exam.

So at that point, it’s basically like do or die whether or not you’re going to be able to be ready is kind of my recommendation. So I’ll have a student take an AAMC exam 31 days out. And if they are within 4 to 6 points, well then you may not feel ready, but data wise, you will likely be ready. But if a student is greater than that, then we kind of have the conversation of like, “Hey, is pushing feasible?” Right? Let’s say a student is 8 points away from their goal score, but they’re like, “Bilal, I’m testing in September. I won’t be able to like study at all up until January. This is like I don’t know if that’s really feasible for me.” I’m like, “Okay, well then it’s not an option. Let’s lock in. Let’s see what sorts of changes we can make, how we can prioritize the MCAT more to get some more hours in to really push hard this last month.”

Pooja: Yeah.

Bilal: So there obviously are going to be multiple factors at play, but that’s generally my approach to how to assess readiness.

Pooja: Amazing. Okay, yeah. So again, just using data.

Bilal: Yep.

Pooja: So in terms of studying and managing your own study schedule, I know that you talked about how for you, you found a lot of success when you were able to create discrete tasks within time blocks and keep yourself accountable as you were studying independently. For people who are not 100% sure if they are able to do that themselves, or if they’re debating whether they should get a tutor or a course, what advice do you have to help people make that decision for themselves?

Bilal: When it comes to making that decision, I think it’s it’s much more driven by your personality and your ability to kind of put everything together and hold yourself accountable, right? Because I think at the end of the day, all of the information for the MCAT, it’s not a secret, right? There’s no secrets that like different test prep companies have or courses have that they’re going to be like, “Bam, we gave you a secret, now you’re going to do super, super well,” right? It’s nothing, I wish it was that easy, right? But it’s it’s not.

Pooja: Yeah.

Bilal: It’s it’s more so just a factor of like, are you going to be able to synthesize everything yourself? Or are you going to pay for the experience of someone else that has synthesized it themselves that can tell you it, right? So for example, if I have a student that’s learning and like taking the exam and doing a ton of practice questions, can both of us end up with the same question strategy? Yes, definitely. Right? But the issue is like a lot of students don’t know how to get to the right place, and that’s where it ends up being kind of challenging, right? So you aren’t necessarily paying for any secrets, you’re paying for the experience of someone that knows how to take this exam and can help you get there faster as opposed to you kind of messing around on your own and then eventually figuring it out.

So yes, in both cases, you are guaranteed going to be able to do well on an exam with or without a test prep course, but it’s how much do you want things spelled out for you as opposed to trying to figure it out yourself.

Pooja: Absolutely. Absolutely. And I will say for anybody who’s debating it, I feel like I’ve used instruction along my entire journey for every exam that I’ve taken. Like I’ve always needed someone, either an advisor or a course or a tutor or whatever, to kind of tell me what to do because I feel like I never am able to formulate the plan myself. I would say that I’m an excellent learner, but I need to be taught. I need someone to be like, “Hey, you’re trying to study everything at the same time. Maybe focus on these things first.” And that there’s no shame in that. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that.

And so I know because I know for me, I when I was studying for my MCAT, I had a really long drawn out journey for it because I was so determined to do it on my own, and learned that I was not was not able to do it successfully on my own. I just like couldn’t come up with the plan that worked. But then once someone gave me a plan, I executed it well and then was able to do well. And so I think it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t take away from my intelligence. I don’t think that I’m not as smart as someone who did it on their own just because I used help. So I just wanted to say that for anybody who is debating it. And I think even for board exams, like we have like these advisors that we used a lot in school, and I was at their office all the time like, “Hey, I need some help.” And they were like, “Please, come, we will help you.” And I ended up doing just as well as my other classmates and no one’s the wiser, you know? So I just wanted to mention that for people as well.

So, Bilal, I we talked about a lot. We talked about all sorts of things. We talked about your own experiences. We busted some myths. We gave some reassurance for our listeners. We talked about burnout and the emotional cost of studying, as well as gave some practical tips for what actually works. And we talked about moving test dates. We talked about independent studying versus whether or not you need a tutor or a class. The only thing that I have left that I wanted to ask you about really quickly before we wrap up this episode is about retakers. We touched on them briefly, but I wanted to talk to you a little bit about it because I know that you didn’t personally retake your exam unless I’m mistaken. But you have students who have. Tell me a little bit about the advice you have for people when they’re making the decision about retaking their test and whether or not they should retake their exam.

Bilal: Yeah, so I think the when it comes to retaking the exam, there’s a couple of factors that come into play. And I think the first one is the score, right?

Pooja: Yeah.

Bilal: Obviously, that’s going to be the driving reason behind retaking. Nobody takes it for fun. Right? It’s going to be some sort of like score-related discussion. Um, and I think that’s going to be very much like an individual discussion, right? I’m not going to sit here and say like, “Hey, this is the bare minimum that you need to score to be able to retake.” But one of the pressures that comes with retaking is that you do have to see an improvement from your previous exam. At least in my limited admissions experience, when it comes to retakers, retakers aren’t necessarily held super negatively in the sense of like, it’s not like the end of the world if you did bad on your first exam if you did better on your next one. But if you end up scoring the same on a bunch of exams, well then that starts to look like a little bit more of a red flag.

So the advice that I often give to retakers is go into this exam with the mindset of you have to see at least like a 4-point increase from your previous exam score to make that retake worthwhile.

Pooja: Got it. Okay.

Bilal: Right? So if you’re scoring like a 500 like 510, for example, and you retake and you get a 511, probably not super helpful in the grand scheme of things. Mm-hmm. Right? But if you take the exam and you score a 500, and you retake, you get a 514, it’s like, okay, well now you’ve made like a pretty sufficient gap between your last exam. That’s made it somewhat worthwhile. So 4 points is kind of like the minimum that I’ll set for students is like, “Hey, this is what we want to hit to make our retake worthwhile.”

And when it comes to organizing the retake, generally the number of hours I’ll give for students is like about 200 hours. So divvy that up however you want, but 200 hours is like the bare minimum that I’ll have a student that’s retaking. And one of the huge advantages of being a retaker is you know what works, right? You’ve gone through the whole process already, you know what you’ve done that works, you know what you’ve done that doesn’t work, and you have kind of a clear thing of what you need to do to get there, right? You understand the journey now, now it’s just about refining your approach over however long you’re going to end up studying.

Pooja: Right. And you have a good sense of what your strengths and weaknesses are already. So earlier when we were talking about that theoretical student who is better at bio than biochem, you already know that, and so you can triage accordingly when thinking about what to study in a given day.

Bilal: Exactly.

Pooja: So to wrap things up, if our listeners could focus on 1 to 2 key strategies for the most efficient MCAT prep, Bilal, what would you tell them to prioritize?

Bilal: If I had to pick one theme that all of the students I’ve worked with that were successful had, it is an ability to effectively review. And what I mean by effectively review is I think it’s very easy to review passively, where you read the question, you’re like, “Oh, I see what the right answer is. I read the answer choice explanation. The answer choice explanation makes sense. I’m going to move on,” right? And it’s like, yes, you’ve reviewed that question, but like have you really? Right? It’s it’s very passive, and you want to focus on having as much of an active review process as you can.

So, what that often means is the second you see that question, you hide the answer explanation. I want you to figure out why the right answer is right without being told why the right answer is right, right? Because you know what the right answer is, right? When you’re reviewing a question, it’ll tell you A is the right answer. So okay, A is the right answer, but I want you to justify why A is the right answer. And the more practice you get justifying why A is the right answer and while your answer is wrong, the more you start to get insights into how AMC’s logic works.

Yeah. And this is true especially for CARS because I think CARS is a section that a lot of students are like, “Oh, this is so subjective, right? This is a very subjective section. I’m just never going to be good at CARS because it’s subjective.” But CARS is very much an objective section in the sense that there’s going to be one right answer and three wrong answers. There’s never going to be a scenario in CARS where it’s like, “Oh, A is kind of right, but B is more right, but C is the most right.” It’s like, hey, you have one right answer and three wrong answers. And that’s true for the sciences as well. And so when you’re going through, you want to figure out, “Okay, well this is my right answer, but how can I concretely prove that the remaining three answer choices are incorrect?” Right? And the better you get at identifying details in the passage or refining your content knowledge, the better you’re going to be able to tackle new and novel questions and scenarios.

Pooja: That makes a lot of sense. And I want to just clarify something, getting into the weeds a little bit because I love your suggestion of actively thinking about why the answer is right. How do you recommend people actually figure that out? Do they just like go into Google and look up things that can help them justify why A is the right answer? Or like how do they go about figuring it out themselves before reading the explanations?

Bilal: Yeah, so you want to try and I want to emphasize, you want to try this on your own first.

Pooja: Yeah.

Bilal: You don’t want to have the cop-out of, “Oh, this looks hard. I don’t really get it. I’m just going to move on.” Because there are a lot of approaches to get to the same answer. A lot of the times, if you look at online explanations, they’re heavily content-focused. So, for example, there’s one question that comes to mind that’s like about lipoic acid on one of the AMC section banks. And you look at the answer choice explanation, it’s like, “Lipoic acid is a cofactor for the pyruvate dehydrogenase complex, which makes acetyl-CoA,” and you’re like, “I just didn’t know that. I’m going to make a flash card. It was a content gap.”

But if you approach that question from the lens of, “Hey, I don’t have any content, how can I still get this right?” Only one of those processes listed out is in the mitochondria at all. So often times, there’s going to be multiple approaches to get to the same right answer. And if you kind of go into the de facto “Oh, content gap, content gap, content gap, content gap,” you often lose out on a lot of the strategy approaches to get to the same answer.

So you want to focus on trying your best to try to figure out why A is the right answer. And there’s going to be times where it’s like, let’s say you have a content gap, and you see this question, you’re like, “I have zero idea how to get there. I am completely stuck.” Right? Then it’s totally fine to go online to try to figure out like where exactly did I go wrong. And there’s tons of like different places that will help you get like resource information for how to review those questions. So you can figure out why that is, but that should very much be like a last resort as opposed to something that you should do always.

Pooja: So relying on what you know and figuring out how can you leverage what you already know to get to the answer without having to rely on any external source, be it the answer explanations or any Google or honestly ChatGPT, or anything else.

Bilal: Yes, I agree. I think ChatGPT is a really, really helpful resource as well if you just like upload questions. I will call out though that it can hallucinate. So just do be careful about some things because I think ChatGPT for some reason sucks with CARS especially. You can gaslight ChatGPT into thinking that any CARS answer is correct. So do be a little bit careful about that because sometimes it will just like explicitly lie to you. But yes, I agree with the rest of that.

Pooja: That is good to know. That is good to know. In terms of small study habits that can make a big impact, is there anything that you recommend that people start implementing as soon as possible because it’s simple, but it actually makes a big impact and is high yield for their MCAT performance?

Bilal: So, I think there’s some that are more of a matter of feasibility than anything else. Like I think one of the things that was very helpful for me is setting aside longer study blocks, right? So trying to set aside like an hour and a half to study and then taking a little bit of a break and then an hour and a half to study and then taking a little bit of a break. But I also recognize that a lot of students won’t have like an hour and a half continuous in their day to study, which is which is totally fine. But if that is possible for you, it is something that I would recommend because it kind of helps to continue to build that stamina.

The other thing that I would really strongly recommend is try to make the MCAT relatable to you. And this is true for psych/soc, and it’s also true for the sciences. Because especially when it comes to psych/soc, I’ll kind of talk through that first, a lot of students do flashcards to like learn the psych/soc terms. And I think that is a fantastic resource. But the downside of doing flashcards to figure out all your psych/soc terms is students learn the textbook definition, but they don’t know what that actually means and looks like, right? You look at symbolic interactionism and you’re like, “Oh, I know what the textbook definition of symbolic interactionism.” And I’m like, “Okay, cool, that’s the textbook definition. Give me an example.”

And the students are like, “Oh, oh, I don’t know an example of symbolic interactionism,” right? It’s just like abstract thing that we have. But the AAMC is not going to ask you for definitions, they’re going to ask you for examples. Yeah. And so you want to make sure that you have personal examples, and that also makes it more memorable, right? You’re like, “Hey, this is a very thing that I remember relating to this MCAT term.”

Yeah. And that same thing carries over for the sciences, right? You want to create analogies to your real life, right? Like we’re thinking about fluids, right? So I can think like, oh, if you’re thinking about the continuity equation, think about a hose and you’re like putting your finger up on the hose and you’re increasing the velocity by decreasing the area. Or you think about like blood pressure and how that relates between your arteries and your capillaries and things like that. Or when you think about like the Venturi effect and you’re like running through a hallway and you’re pushing against the outside for pressure, right?

You want to try to create like real-world analogies and examples, and this will help you make connections between the different topics, right? You want to avoid learning things in isolation, right? And I think this is true for a lot of topics, especially in chem/phys where a lot of students will learn these topics as if they’re their own individual isolated world and they’re entirely separate from everything else. And when you learn like that, it can be really, really difficult to actually understand what things mean.

So the electrostatics example is a great example of this, where like you have an equation for voltage. And if I tell… if you ask me right now to explain what voltage is without using any of the other electrostatics equations, I don’t know if I could do it. Yeah. I’ve watched like an hour and a half long documentary about voltage and like what it means and I have like still like, cool, but also questions, right?

So when you think about things as just like one absolute thing, it’s very hard to define. But the advantage of learning through making connections is like, hey, I don’t fully understand what voltage and abstract concept is, but I know how voltage is related to these three other things. I know how it’s related to Coulombic electrostatics forces. I know how it’s related to electric field. And now that I’m making these connections, when I get a question, I know how to tackle that because I have connections made to where I need to go.

Pooja: Yeah. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So connection building is really important and being able to actually deepen your understanding of some things that you can apply it rather than just regurgitate information seems to be essential for improving MCAT performance. Would you agree?

Bilal: Exactly.

Pooja: Amazing. So, the one the one last question that I have for you before we really wrap up is it seems like the MCAT is kind of like the beginning of just high pressure environments that I think people who are going into medicine get accustomed to. But for people who are perhaps struggling with that, what mindset shift do you think can help when it comes to being able to go from someone who crumbles under pressure to being someone who thrives under it?

Bilal: There are 2 factors that matter here, at least in my experience. And the first one is one that we’ve talked a little bit about already, which is you can be really focused and on the MCAT when you’re able to also equally turn off, right? If you’re in a constant high stress environment, you are going to struggle, right? Because you’re just constantly stressed out of your mind. When you think about people that are successful under pressure, they are successful not just because they’re able to handle pressure well but because they also have times where they aren’t under pressure, right? They have all these times where they’re separate from that.

And secondly, you want to try to recreate that pressure as best as you can in the places that you need to, right? So for example, when you’re taking your full lengths, you want to take your full lengths just like how you’re going to take your actual exam, right? So don’t use your phone between the breaks. Don’t drink water, don’t go to the bathroom during your sections, right? Follow the exact test taking protocol. And the more you can recreate what you’re going to experience, the better you’re going to be able to do, right? It’s like practice for the basketball game, right? Coming back to that, right? Where you want to be in the gym and you’re you’re shooting the ball alone, you want to try your best to recreate what you’re actually going to see out on the court, right? And when you are able to recreate that to the best of your ability, it’s never going to be 1 to 1, right? There’s always going to be heightened anxiety when you’re like walking to your actual test center, right? It’s not it’s never going to be the same.

But the more that you’ve practiced the scenario in your mind, the more times that you’ve done the exact thing that you’re going to do, the better you’re going to be able to do on that actual exam.

Pooja: No, absolutely. I completely, completely agree. Well, Bilal, thank you so much for taking the time to chat with me and to joining us on this episode. Um, I feel like my favorite takeaway from our conversation and I think is the most high yield thing that someone can get out of this episode is using the data that you’ve gathered from yourself. So whether it’s how you’re feeling during practice exams, the actual scores that you get or how you’re doing on individual topics that you’ve studied before, all of those things are just pieces of information that you can use to inform what your next steps are.

And also realizing that this exam is a big part of your application, but it’s not the only thing that’s going to be determining your success. And so realizing that it is just a piece of the puzzle rather than the end all, be all is also super important. So, yeah, thank you guys for listening. Thank you Bilal for joining us, and we will see you guys next time.