Another Full Length Exam

Did another practice full length exam this afternoon.  Here’s how it all shook out:

Physical Sciences: 13
Verbal Reasoning: 10
Biological Sciences: 12
Comprehensive: 35

I’ve been scoring in the 10-11 range on the Exam Krackers verbal reasoning practice exams and I seem to be in around that range on the AAMC sections as well.  For the most part, I’m somewhat pleased with my results so far.  My target score is a 35, but I’d really like to be averaging in the 37-38 range before I sit for the real thing.

One of the things that I’ve started to conclude is that the exam does not really seem to rely on a lot of background knowledge.  A lot of the questions have very little to do with the passages and the stems often give enough information to figure out the correct answer.  Also, the exams seem to be very amenable to a process-of-elimination strategy.  I sort of feel like I’m cheating or gaming the exam, but I don’t care – I’m not looking for the exam to confirm to me that I understand science.  All I care about is scoring a 35 or higher.  If the test writers are going to be foolish enough to provide me with 2 answers that make no physical sense, then I have no problem taking advantage of that.

So, I have two weeks left, another 6 chapters of practice passages to work and review in chemistry, biology, and physics, along with another 6 verbal full-length exams and of course, five more full-length AAMC exams to take and review.  I’m really tired of studying – it is really hard to keep every burner going like this for 4 months.  To any of you out there that frequent SDN and hear of people studying endlessly for six months, ignore them – no one can maintain that kind of intensity for that long.  I think that four months is really the upper bound on how long you can work towards one day and exam.

In other news, my girl is in town for the next four weeks.  Actually, she’s gone for a week in Alabama, and then she’ll be back here for four weeks.  She’s just started watching Game of Thrones so we will probably watch a couple of them, make dinner a few times, and then hopefully go for a hike while she’s here.

At some point in the next week or so, I want to try and put down some of the things that I’ve learned during the last few months and what I would recommend to others that want to do the best that they can on this exam.