The Medical College Admission Test, or MCAT for short, is an 8-hour comprehensive critical thinking exam offered by the American Association of Medical Colleges (AAMC) and currently administered through Pearson VUE testing centers. Pre-medical students looking to attend medical school in the United States or Canada should plan on taking the MCAT Exam, as it is an entrance requirement in virtually all allopathic and osteopathic schools as of 2020. Bear in mind that while a select few schools may not require the MCAT, these are without exception private institutions and their practices may not be in the best interests of the applicant.
The MCAT is divided into the following 4 blocks:
Chemical and Physical Foundations of Biological Systems Section (C&P)
Critical Analysis and Reasoning Skills Section (CARS)
Biological and Biochemical Foundations of Living Systems Section (B&B)
Psychological, Social, and Biological Foundations of Behavior Section (P/S)
The Chemical and Physical Foundations of Biological Systems Section (C&P). This section is 30% General Chemistry 25%, Biochemistry, 25% Physics 15% Organic Chemistry, and 5% Biology. Unlike your college courses, where you might have taken general chemistry in your first year, followed by organic chemistry the next and biochemistry after that - here you will be dealing with all of these topics at once. And your organic chemistry course may not have asked you to recall a lot of general chemistry - just some major points, at best. All that stoichiometry, empirical formulas and pH calculations don’t really show up again in Organic Chemistry. Instead they make way for multi-step synthesis problems and arrow-pushing diagrams. The MCAT won’t necessarily keep these ideas separate the way your college course did. On a regular old Chem/Phys passage, you might have a couple of General Chemistry questions, a couple of Organic Chemistry ones, and even a Biochemistry question or a question that draws on concepts from several subjects. For this reason, studying for the MCAT is a lot about learning how subjects related and how the connections between them work.
The second section is the Critical Analysis and Reasoning Skills (CARS) section. This is purely a reading comprehension and reasoning test, that does its very best to not make you rely on any outside knowledge. It is composed entirely of passages from various branches of the humanities. More details on this section will be provided later.
The third section is the Biological and Biochemical Foundations of Living Systems section, or B&B section for short. This section is comprised of 65% Biology, 25% Biochemistry, 5%, General Chemistry, and 5% Organic Chemistry questions. The biology material itself falls into roughly two categories: Molecular biology (including for instance, molecular genetics) and macroscopic biology, the study of physiology and anatomic systems. Beware that many college courses do not address physiology and anatomy in sufficient depth for the MCAT. If you are able to take additional courses in biology, advanced or upper division courses in biology, those will definitely come in handy when preparing for the MCAT.
The last section is the Psychological, Social, and Biological Foundations of Behaviour (P/S). You can see that it's 65% Psychology, 30%, Sociology and 5% Biology. The depth of these subjects is just introductory level, so you don't need to take any advanced courses. Intro to Psych and Intro to Social Studies are sufficient. Many students take the MCAT without ever having taken these courses and do fine. To perform on P/S at a reasonable level on the MCAT requires mostly memorizing terms and understanding them, and not so much a complex understanding of their inter-relation the way the other two science sections might - this won’t mean that the section itself will be easy, but that preparing for it definitely is not as complicated as preparing for the other two science sections.
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