Free Great Resources for MCAT
Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with any of the suggestions below, nor do I feel the need to promote them. I simply included them because they have areas in which people have benefited, and that’s what this is about – sharing useful information.
Image is credited to Tony Crider.
I think it’s a good idea to have main prep company that you can dedicate your majority of time to study for MCAT, and other remaining resources for additional review. Or, you can have one or two company for prep tests and other resources for doing “content review.” Whatever the case is, these resources are useful for MCAT though they should not be your only resources because the core of prep for any standardized test comes from practices.
Founded and maintained by John Wetzel, this is a website that has tons of great videos about MCAT. I haven’t watched all of them (I only watched one or two at tops and not even full because they are rather long), but people have showed interest on them. They are free to watch, and the only “fee” is if you decide to buy flashcards. Probably the two things that are rather disappointing about this website are 1) there are no practice tests for simulation (they are all just content reviews) and 2) this website’s verbal reasoning – and yes, you don’t need to do “content review” for verbal reasoning – is really weak. If you go to its section for verbal reasoning, all he has is some tips about MCAT Verbal Reasoning (which anyone can really suggest, frankly) and bunch of books from Amazon. This may be helpful if you had 6+ months before the test, but about a month before the test? Not so much. Still, it’s a good site that obviously had tons of hours put into it.
This one is more word-based website that still provides reviews but not actual videos/lectures. The navigation of the site to find the useful information was a bit annoying (I’m not too fond of the way the webmaster set up the taxonomy), but there are some contents though it’s not as intense. Clicking the “Forum” takes you to Premed101 forum, which is a popular, but not as large as Student Doctor Network. Not a bad site, but I wouldn’t expect too much from it. It will, however, take much less time to go through all the contents here than WikiPremed.
I say this is my favorite because time matters more than videos, but anyways, MCAT Reviews is like your shortened notes from courses. It takes the huge amount of information available in MCAT and condenses it into easy (but thorough) notes that you can study. Of course, it doesn’t contain ALL information (no MCAT prep book is) so you will find somethings that are not covered, but still, its amount of materials is very huge. It also lacks in terms of practice tests, but you are probably better off just buying few tests after going through this one. Now, my last point about this one is that if you have not done any content review or lack a strong foundation, it will be pointless to learn from it because this one isn’t in paragraph form, but rather like a list, so study a bit and review/study/use it.
