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From plateauing MCAT scores, and having to retake, to breaking down days before exam day, all 70+ MedLife Mastery Mentors suffered the frustrations and disappointments that come with MCAT prep. Yet we ALL ended up getting 90+ percentile MCAT scores and are on our way to (or already in) med-school! Now we want to help you do the same!
If you're struggling with the MCAT, need some extra motivation, want to know how top scorers before you studied and learn their best strategies, this show is for you. You have what it takes to beat this exam. Weāre here to make sure of that!
Anna Patel (00:00)
When I was studying for the MCAT, I definitely had times where I felt uncertain about how to approach certain questions. I would read the answer choices and they would all kind of stare back at me and I would feel like I had nowhere to go. For that type of situation, I think the best thing that you can do for yourself is to have some sort of system to fall back on, some sort of structure that you can just use automatically. And for me, I found that to be the process of elimination. And today we're going to walk through how to use this strategy.
In your preparation and also in your test taking. Start. Hi, I'm Anna and I'm a mentor here at Medlife Mastery. I'm really excited to bring this strategy to you guys, and I think that it was really helpful for me both when I was studying for the MCAT and also through my time in medical school. So thank you for tuning in and let's jump into it. Firstly, the process of elimination is not to be used for every question. I think that was one of the biggest learning curves for me. I think if you know an answer immediately and it's jumping out at you.
And you feel confident about that choice, I would say select that answer and move on rather than ruminate further. However, when you are unsure about the answer choices, or maybe a few of them look correct, that is the process of elimination's time to shine. That's when you can look at your answer choices, consider them all, and decide if any of them are worth eliminating, getting rid of, so that way you no longer have to think about them. So
That is the first principle that I wanted to highlight and make sure that everyone was using so that way you optimize the amount of time you're using on each question. The second thing that's really important to remember is that when you eliminate an answer, you really want to properly and fully eliminate it. You don't want to be eliminating any answers that you think have some merit to be correct because you really want to be able to put the eliminated answers out of your mind and be able to only focus on the ones that are left standing.
So, to be able to do that, you need to make sure that you're not eliminating any answers that you think have the possibility of being correct. To know if you're doing this correctly, there's an easy step that you can take to test. You can always review a practice test or review a practice session that you've already done and see if there are any questions in which you've ruled out answers and if you've ever ruled out the correct answer. It's good to look and see if there if that's a trend at all, if you've ruled out correct answers in the past and if it happens over and over again. And if it does,
Then it's worth reevaluating the way that you eliminate answers and making sure that when you do it again in the future, you're really only eliminating ones you're a hundred percent unsure of. The test to know if you're doing it correctly is if all the answers that you get wrong are only ones that are left remaining in an elimination process. So if I cross out A and D, you should only be bet picking between B and C. And if the correct answer was B, you should have picked C and not one of the ones that you eliminated.
So that for me I thought was really helpful because it really lessened my mental load. It let me look at those two answers and be like, those are really the only two possible answers. and that is how it really works at its core. So that's an important point that I wanted to impress upon you. I think another important, important thing to do when you're doing the process of elimination and when you're approaching the MCAT in general is to reread the question every single time. You want to make sure not every answer choice that you're reading, do you need to reread the question, but when you are
really contemplating the answer choices. It's important to ground yourself in what the question is asking you. Too many people will read all the way to answer choice C and then forget what question they're supposed to be answering. And I think sometimes it can be useful when you're contemplating and thinking through each of the answer choices to anchor yourself back in the question and be able to reread it and really consider what the what the question is asking of you. So when you're eliminating answer choices and you're
Going through and crossing things off, just make sure that you're anchoring yourself in the question and you're not just forgetting what they're asking you directly. And I think it's important to it sounds like common sense, but I think it often is forgotten by students when they're going through things. So that is another tip that I think is really helpful. This point is one that everyone seems to struggle with when taking the MCAT, including myself. This is something that I struggled with extensively. And this is choosing between two answer choices once you've eliminated the other ones. I think that.
There are two ways that you can go about this, or two steps that you need to take to go about this. And the first one goes back to my prior point, which is just grounding yourself in the question and making sure that when you're looking at these two answer choices, that you have reread the question and know exactly what it wants from you. So that's step number one. Number two is separating these two answer choices and deciding what makes them different from each other. What makes them distinct answer choices instead of one? Because as you know, there's only one correct answer per question.
So there's a reason that they're separate and there's a reason that one of them is wrong. And I think looking at what's different between the two of them can help you identify what might be wrong about one of them. So what I would do is look at each of the questions, or sorry, the answer choices, decide what do you think is the main point of each of them, kind of summarize them to yourself, and then see which one responds to the question better. The MCAT can be tricky and it can tell you one answer choice is
Technically factually correct, it's grounded in the passage somewhere, but it doesn't answer the question as well as the other answer choice. So that's like it's not the best answer or the best answer. And that is sometimes confusing for students. So I would say the best thing that you can do is debate these answer choices, compare them to the question, make sure that you know why they're separate, and see which one is the best answer. Even if one of them is correct, that doesn't make it the best answer to the question that you're starting with. So that
Is the key to deciding between the two. And I think once you've mastered that, that's a huge skill and can earn you a lot of points on the MCAT. One last quick note on math and exponents and how that can play into the process of elimination. Sometimes on the MCAT you'll get answer choices in which all of the exponents are different. So each answer is a different order of magnitude. I think a quick way to eliminate a lot of answers at once is to figure out what the proper exponent is supposed to be.
And that is a lot simpler of a math setup a lot of the time than doing the entire equation. So for me, I like to see students do figure out what the proper exponent is and therefore guide their answer to that specific answer choice that reflects that proper exponent. And that can really accelerate the math that you do and prevent you from getting trapped in some math error. So that is one of my hacks to math.
And I think that that can be really helpful in narrowing down to a couple answers or just one. The process of elimination is not about knowing every answer. It's about giving yourself a way to think clearly when you feel confused and overwhelmed, and to give yourself some sort of structure to hold on to in those moments. And the best MCAT students aren't ones that never freeze up or never feel confused, but they're the ones that know how to operate when they do feel that way. So I hope that you were able to get that from this video and understand the process of elimination.
And hopefully you will be able to look and reflect on your own performance to see if you've been using it correctly and if there's a way that you can optimize that use. Thank you for tuning in about the process of elimination. If you're interested in using MedLife's resources in order to practice this skill, there are free passages that you can use to really train yourself to use it. And also there's an error tracker where you can keep track of why you got questions wrong, and then you can also make notes about whether or not you use the pro the process of elimination properly in that situation. So
Feel free though to check those out on Medlife Masteries free resources page. And thank you so much again. you've got this. One question and one elimination at the at a time.