MCAT Prep

Overview

The MCAT is unlike the tests that came before it. It runs to 230 questions across roughly seven and a half hours, and most of those questions attach to a passage — a study, an experiment, an argument — that you have never seen before. Recall alone does not carry you through it. The exam is built to find out whether you can take what you know and use it on unfamiliar material, under time pressure, for longer than feels reasonable.

That shape decides how preparation should work. Content review matters, but it is the floor rather than the ceiling: knowing the Michaelis-Menten equation is not the same as recognising, in a passage you are reading for the first time, that an unchanged maximum velocity alongside a raised Kₘ means competitive inhibition. The work that moves a score is practice against passages, followed by honest review of every question missed — not just what the right answer was, but why the answer you chose looked right.

Scoring reflects the same design. Each of the four sections is scaled from 118 to 132, and the four combine into a total between 472 and 528. A 500 sits roughly in the middle. Because the sections are scaled separately, a weakness in one is visible and fixable rather than buried inside an overall percentage.

What We Cover

• Chemical and Physical Foundations of Biological Systems
• Critical Analysis and Reasoning Skills (CARS)
• Biological and Biochemical Foundations of Living Systems
• Psychological, Social, and Biological Foundations of Behavior

Study On Your Own

Alongside one-to-one tutoring, the MCAT course runs as a self-guided programme: content review by topic with a check on each one, a question bank, section practice exams, and timed full-length simulations scored out of 528.

The Diagnostic Test is free, and so is the preparation guide — take the Diagnostic Test first and find out which sections actually need the work.

Open the MCAT Course