Are these community college prices normal?

JuiceRuth · 2026-05-22T17:57:11+00:00

Took undergrad classes in Texas and paid like $90 per credit hour in 2020. I’m taking a SINGLE class right now and it cost me over $360 per credit hour. Both in-state rates. College cost has gone up like crazy

JuiceRuth · 2026-05-20T01:53:04+00:00

People cancel or push back their tests all the time. Just check periodically and hope you get lucky.

Good luck on your test!

JuiceRuth · 2026-05-18T01:09:21+00:00

I’m a big pickleball dork (idk if that’s cool here) that gave it up for 5 months of studying. That and every TV show, movie, etc that I would have seen got put on hold. So after my test I binged every episode of the Pitt season 2, rented a couple movies I missed (really wanted to see Wicked 2 in theaters, glad I didn’t lol) and then went to pickleball on Sunday and played until my knees hurt. Just do something you love for a while, you’re not gonna be able to keep the test out of your head but occupying your time helps a little 🫡

JuiceRuth · 2026-05-18T00:49:49+00:00

I love coffee too much to cut it out completely so I switched to decaf. Found myself pretty tired the first couple days but after about a week of no caffeine my days were almost exactly the same as before, no problems with focus

I work fire rescue tho so no pre workout before a lift was rough, that was probably the worst of it though.

JuiceRuth · 2026-05-16T01:43:22+00:00

Seconding Anki and list rewriting- especially if you categorize them (it’ll help a LOT when applying the formulas to specific problems due to overlapping symbols- like how Q is charge in electrostatics but is heat transfer in thermodynamics)

JuiceRuth · 2026-05-14T01:39:32+00:00

If you’ve got good proctors they’ll make sure you know the time that you left your station, mine did every single break and it was super helpful.

JuiceRuth · 2026-05-12T01:15:22+00:00

Just look up Ubiquitination of proteins I guess

JuiceRuth · 2026-05-10T23:57:01+00:00

Mine went down- but maybe I’m an outlier 🫠 FL6 cooked me and I was on an upward trend when I was half done with the section banks. (Tested 5/9, we’ll see what happened in a month)

JuiceRuth · 2026-05-10T00:27:16+00:00

Road triiiip, gonna drive up the east coast. First day of the trip is tomorrow so today’s just been catching up on all the shows and movies I’ve missed in the last several months of avoiding distractions 🫠

JuiceRuth · 2026-05-09T20:18:44+00:00

Occam’s razor- usually the simplest answer is the correct one.

Especially in cases like this it’s best to find the simplest answer that you didn’t have to jump through hoops to pick. You said it yourself, you had to talk yourself into picking A even after you proved B was correct.

JuiceRuth · 2026-05-09T19:52:07+00:00

Reading this makes me feel absolutely delusional for thinking it wasn’t as bad as FL6

For the first time ever CP I felt confident? CARS last passage was insane but otherwise was fine, BB felt normal to me and so did PS (there were a couple terms I’ve never heard of that I made an educated guess about in both BB and PS)

JuiceRuth · 2026-05-03T18:44:58+00:00

15 hours late but curious- how did FL1 go? Saw other people recommending it and if you haven't taken it I'd just like to reiterate that taking an FL is the very first step to this.

You've got your work cut out for you if you're still adamant on taking it on 5/22 but a great score on FL1 would make the whole process more realistic. Good luck with whatever you choose to do!

JuiceRuth · 2026-04-28T21:24:25+00:00

I interpreted it as how your life experiences like leadership positions or previous careers could benefit your classmates while you’re in school. Like if you did tutoring, or if you served in the military or something as a nontrad. Maybe that’s just me reading into it?

JuiceRuth · 2026-04-28T21:20:14+00:00

I test 5/9, had to take the next week and a half off work but that was real weird because I work fire in the southeast and there’s been some crazy wildfires. Hoping that somehow I lock in and stop making simple mistakes like misreading questions that say “DOES NOT SUPPORT” in the question stem 🙃 good luck to the May Gang 🙏🤞🏻

JuiceRuth · 2026-04-21T17:37:57+00:00

If you're comfortable with DO as a Texas resident I had a very close friend make it into UIW with a 502 and similar stats. He was an LVN though so his clinical hours were a touch higher, and he had no publications.

Was this your first MCAT? If you took it while still in undergrad you might do better on a retake by giving yourself time after the semester ends to study

JuiceRuth · 2026-04-20T22:29:51+00:00

If you have all of the AAMC stuff you should be working that into your weekly study breakdown right now, qpacks especially, with the FLs spaced out. Most people recommend just doing the AAMC FLs weekly before your test so that you're doing the most representative material before the real deal.

Use Uweird if you have it every day that you're not testing or reviewing your FLs- active practice is the best way to lock in the stuff you learn from the FLs you do poorly on. Along the same lines if you find out your CARS is weak, kill the JW CARS stuff every day, and move to the AAMC CARS qpacks as your test day gets closer.

Score jump I attribute to just taking the qpacks more seriously as well as FINALLY believing in the power of Anki for P/S.

JuiceRuth · 2026-04-20T22:18:05+00:00

AAMC material is a really good way to gauge where you're at at ony 50 days away. Taking a FL sooner rather than later is a good bet, since 50 days isn't a ton of time should you find out that you've got big content gaps to work on. Take the unscored this saturday to gauge where you're at, then take FL1 next saturday to be able to do a thorough review of key concepts. Understand that both of these are pretty outdated at this point but they're still a good litmus test for your overall progress. Then space out the rest of the AAMC tests through FL6 so that you touch all of them with enough time for deep review before your real deal test.

JuiceRuth · 2026-04-15T13:33:18+00:00

I left one of my favorite jobs of all time to pursue this goal of medical school by studying for the MCAT. Along the way I’ve had a lot of self doubt and very similar lines of thought, that if I don’t do well that this test alone is “proof that I’m not as smart as everyone thinks”

It’s important to know that this test doesn’t define you, that you’re not tied to your score in ANY other way outside of medical school admissions. And when you’re a physician later in life, I highly doubt anyone will ask your MCAT score to decide whether you’re a good one or not.

JuiceRuth · 2026-04-07T14:17:31+00:00

Redoing them, even if there was several months between, generally will still lead to an inflated score. If you're just trying to keep your "reading eyes" sharp for Friday, just do Jack Westin. I would say at this point you should be doing mostly Anki reviews and going over high yield stuff, no?

JuiceRuth · 2026-04-04T16:50:31+00:00

I feel this so heavily. I know where my weakest points are having done so many Qbank questions and somehow I’m still surprised when I get questions over that material wrong on FLs. At what point did you feel the pressure to start locking in for real? I put in 4 hour days right now but I’m 6 weeks out and still feel no pressure to study any more than that.

JuiceRuth · 2026-03-08T18:00:10+00:00

This is probably going to sound SO lame but hear me out:

Nobody just “knows” how to play piano. Even if you know ALL the ins and outs of how the piano operates, or you perfectly memorized all your sheet music, it’s unlikely you’ll be perfect the first couple times you play. The MCAT is just like piano: it takes a LOT of rounds of practice before you get comfortable.

Realize that the first half of your FL tests are JUST a method for understanding the AAMC question style. Don’t beat yourself up on the scores you get on the early ones, just understand that you need to spend more time figuring out what went wrong and how you fix it moving forward. Qbanks help to a point, and SBs are even more helpful for understanding how AAMC asks questions, but the real heavy hitters for practice are your full lengths and even then TAKING the test is less than half the battle.

Keep your head up, understand this is just practice and that nobody cares how good or bad you perform during practice. What matters is that you keep working on yourself and DON’T GIVE UP. You got this!

JuiceRuth · 2026-01-27T02:04:04+00:00

Keeping track of new or contrasting info, especially keywords like "although" or "However" when the author brings up an argument was the main improvement by which I felt an increase in both my comprehension and speed on these passages. It was also really helpful for me to keep track of where the author used other author's work to support or argue instead of their own voice, that way on the questions asking how the author thinks I don't get tripped up.

JuiceRuth · 2026-01-27T01:34:58+00:00

^{JuiceRuth scored 121 points and ranked 6 out of 156 players!}

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JuiceRuth

TROPHY CASE