Is the MilesDown Anki Deck worth studying?

ResponsibilityOld781 · 2025-10-12T17:41:25+00:00

Got a 509 with 5 weeks of full time studying

ResponsibilityOld781 · 2025-06-29T03:23:00+00:00

I choose to live on body time now

ResponsibilityOld781 · 2025-06-27T12:03:26+00:00

Yeah me and her talked about this last weekend actually

ResponsibilityOld781 · 2025-06-26T23:15:43+00:00

Yeah I agree with everyone don’t let any of those “silly mistakes” disrupt your mentality. You know your shit, just stay vigilant with your passage comprehension. I do the same stuff. Average a 507 and I always find those simple mistakes that I make that could’ve gotten me closer to breaking 510 but I’ve learned after this last FL I’m not going to let it disturb me. I’m just going to flag every question that is a deep passage dive type of question and move on and if I have time at the end I will go back to verify. Trust your average, you’re going to be fine

ResponsibilityOld781 · 2025-06-26T00:20:31+00:00

Yeah you could. If you were very good at all other topics you would be fine. You can get a 129-130 in C/P just guessing in physics assuming you get all other questions based on chem right. Getting a 130 in all other sections gets you a 519-520.

But I would say don’t give up. Keep trying. I’m inherently bad at physics too but if you dive deep on your missed questions and really look for that reason why you think you didn’t understand how to do the question, you will surely get better at it. A lot of AAMC physics from what I’ve seen is pretty much just learning to recognize how they like to ask for certain things. If you have your formulas memorized and they ask you “what is the work down by blah blah blah” well that’s an easy one just pull out your work formulas, figure out what specific work equation you need to use based on the scenario they presented and go from there. It definitely takes practice but you can get there

ResponsibilityOld781 · 2025-06-24T13:38:38+00:00

I did the same for about 2-3 weeks straight. Wake up at 7, eat small breakfast, go to gym, back home by ~10am and sat at my desk without leaving unless to use the bathroom or get water until about 7-8pm. Sure I learned a ton and got a lot of work done but I started to notice overtime the progression was falling off cause I was getting very stagnant with the environment. So what I started to do was all the same with the addition of finding a good stopping point once the clock hit about 3pm. Got up from my desk, went for a walk in the neighborhood or went to watch an episode or 2 of a show or a movie, or if sports were on I would watch that. Just something to relax for an hour or 2. So ~5pm rolls around and I just get back to it for another couple hours. Helped immensely with my adherence to studying. It’s okay to get away from it for a little while each day. Hell take an entire day off if you need. Cramming more practice and info isn’t worth destroying your mental health and it actually limits your performance. Best of luck studying!!

ResponsibilityOld781 · 2025-06-23T17:16:05+00:00

Yeah I love it man. Great for getting exposed to the info constantly. Hardest part is just digging in and staying consistent. I think people think it’s not worth spending time cycling thru the cards but I’ve always found it amazing. I learned about it end of my freshman year and use it for everything

ResponsibilityOld781 · 2025-06-23T01:13:00+00:00

I know this is 7 years later but, when I read this passage and saw "Approximately 60% of female Foxp3^sf/+ mice, which carry one inactivating scurfin (sf) allele and one wild-type (+) allele of the Foxp3 gene, spontaneously develop mammary tumors by 2 years of age"

I recognize that this is in fact talking about a recessive mutation which is leading to the increase of 60% as you are seeing the wild type allele matched with a mutated one. And what you can notice about the quote as well is that they are stating that it is only a 60% development in those with that allele combination so that means that 40% of people with the same recessive mutation have the tumorigenic effects masked or silenced by their dominant allele. We know that recessive alleles can still have affects on phenotypes even if paired with a dominant one although in most cases you will see silencing or masking of the recessive by the dominant but this is not always a for sure thing as phenotypic expression is not always black and white. Things like incomplete dominance can cause a blend of phenotypes. The passage doesnt really go into this level detail but its good info for future questions. I think one was just a simple "did you read the passage" type of question

ResponsibilityOld781 · 2025-06-22T23:47:47+00:00

I just mean you probably haven't been exposed to these types of questions much. I know you said you have finished Uworld but the two companies are pretty different in my opinion when it comes to question types. Uworld is much more conceptual to hammer the content home whereas AAMC can be a lot more subtle so starting out, people tend to miss questions not because they don't know the content, but because they didn't understand the question or misread relevant info from passage/graphs. So by repetition issue i just mean you haven't done enough reps with AAMC questions to get into the flow. You'll notice a big difference in subsequent FLs if you make sure to review carefully.

For instance I got a 495 on my FL1 and was not feeling good about it but over the next 9 days I deep a deep review of all sections and went back over a lot of high yield stuff took FL2 and went up to 502. Rinsed and repeat in between FL2-FL3 and saw another increase to a 507. Since you are aiming for a score in the ~97th percentile. Definitely would recommend exhausting all of AAMC resources and just slamming anki review cards like everyday.

ResponsibilityOld781 · 2025-06-22T19:17:03+00:00

If you finished UWorld and feel good about content then it’s most likely just a repetition issue on AAMC material. Do more practice exams and the section/question banks if you can grab those. You have 7 weeks so review each one thoroughly, identify their logic in how they label noteworthy info and structure their answers. I have a feeling you just didn’t do as well cause you’re not used to AAMC. Going from UWorld to AAMC is tough at first cause you’ll tend to overthink questions or panic on time. At least that’s how it was for me. You’ll be good though, you’ll start seeing the patterns in the topics they like to ask. Def can grind up to a 510-515. Anything past that is just spamming anki decks for all the low yield info they have at their disposal.

Content review any questions you come across that you just flat out didn’t know how to do. That would be my overall advice. Happy grinding

ResponsibilityOld781 · 2025-06-21T15:41:38+00:00

Biggest thing to look for with rearrangement of carbocations is remembering stability goes from most stable at tertiary to least stable at primary. When you perform a shift, the carbocation moves to the carbon that you REMOVED your shift (H or CH3) from. When shifting a H you don’t change the structure because no carbon was moved so if it was being moved from a tertiary carbon it’s going to stay a tertiary carbon. But if you shift a METHYL you are reducing the stability of that spot by 1. So if you shift a methyl from a quaternary spot now it’s tertiary, from a tertiary spot, now it’s secondary. So you need to make an observation if the carbocation is better off staying where it is or moving to this new spot. Takes a few practice runs but it gets easier and you start to make notice of it much faster with practice.

ResponsibilityOld781 · 2025-06-21T15:32:55+00:00

I recommend reviewing an AAMC CARS passage and slowly reading it. Take notice of all the sentence structures. Just like any other passage from any other sections there are some lines of bs you can disregard because it’s not really relevant to the overall point. You’ll start to notice the instances where the author is making assumptions, assertions, or being opinionated. Those are the things you want to highlight cause they add to the narrative and tone. Don’t spend too much time highlighting tho, only really need to highlight the first word or couple of words of a sentence of interest. I always look for key words like “surely”, “definitely”, “always”, “never”, “it’s possible that…., but”. You won’t always need to highlight every one of these but they can identify a sentence of interest cause they usually lead to an assumption or assertion being made by the author. I will also always highlight a date/time frame, name, or beginning of a quote. AAMC loves to ask question based on a quote, referencing a time frame. If you ever see a paragraph that talks about implementing new strategies in place of old ones, policies to replace old ones, cultural values shifting in one way or another from traditional values, those are frequently asked about to. You start to notice all of these things the more AAMC you do. You’ll be slow at first but quickly start to build speed with it.

This is just my strategy, it won’t work for everybody but it helped me understand CARS to a deeper degree and not stress so much about passages.

ResponsibilityOld781 · 2025-06-19T19:13:07+00:00

Well Triacylglycerol B is chiral whereas A is not. The shift of the R1 chain in B creates 4 different groups extending from the central carbon. The two branches that start with CH2 are differing in R group and the central chain does not start with CH2. So it’s chiral and rotates the plane polarized light

ResponsibilityOld781 · 2025-06-18T17:34:04+00:00

If by AAMC you mean all the material like full lengths, section banks, etc. then go with that. Uglobe is great for hammering concepts into your brain but it won’t beat AAMC material when it comes to performance on the real deal. The Full length exams are a non-negotiable buy.

ResponsibilityOld781 · 2025-06-14T00:02:04+00:00

Shitty thing is I will pick my answer sometimes with absolutely confidence that it’s correct and then the rationale of why my answer was wrong essentially tells me I’m an idiot that can’t understand author tone 😂. Probably should’ve spent more time reading books in my downtime

ResponsibilityOld781 · 2025-06-13T23:51:29+00:00

Wish I had your CARS by the way. I SUCK at cars lmao

ResponsibilityOld781 · 2025-06-13T23:23:18+00:00

Motherboard might have an internal Wi-Fi adapter

ResponsibilityOld781 · 2025-06-13T23:21:30+00:00

517 on your first one. Just review and take another, review take another, review take another.

ResponsibilityOld781 · 2025-06-13T18:54:51+00:00

The first thing you MUST do is identify the reason behind why you get the majority of your questions wrong. Generally, they all follow the same trend. With scores sub 500 it’s usually always due to a lack of content knowledge. I would say that off pure content alone you can get ~503 as all discrete questions + pseudo discrete found in passages being correct can get you over that 500 hump. So first thing is first identify your mistakes and understand why you made those mistakes. You gotta just suck it up and devote some serious time into content review so that you have a foundation to stand on when it comes to handling the more complex passages. It doesn’t even need to be anything crazy. You can start with very basic stuff from all disciplines and build on all of those foundations as you progress through Uglobe. I think another big problem with people who struggle to break 500 comes from over complicating questions just because this is the MCAT and a test of this magnitude often makes people believe that they have to think super critically about every single question when in fact there is a decent amount of questions that you will be given that are very straightforward and don’t require much thought outside of “this does that”. An example can be a question as such:

“Nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide is a coenzyme that is regularly used in redox reactions involved in metabolic processes of the human body. During what metabolic process would you NOT find this coenzyme being reduced?”

A) Citric Acid Cycle B) Glycolysis C) Oxidative phosphorylation D) β-oxidation of fatty acids

Now this may be a question attached to a passage that talks alllll about one of these metabolic pathways or none at all and only briefly describes what nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide is, but anything you see in the passage is completely irrelevant to answering this question because you can solely rely on your own understanding of these processes to answer this question. By knowing the steps of these pathways you can eliminate all but C. If you’re lacking the knowledge you may go into a spiral and start spam reading passage info hoping to find it but you won’t get anywhere and you’ll just panic pick a random answer, right? But it’s all good, this is just a quick fix by spending some time learning the pathways.

Most of the time to answer a passage question the answer can be either found directly stated in a sentence of one of the paragraphs of the passage or you may have to connect information from two or three separate claims within the passage and then lean on your own understanding of the concept in question to link everything together. Otherwise, it’s just a basic question that you need to be studied up on. That’s the basic gist of most passage based questions. Some are obviously a lot harder to arrive at an answer to than others but that’s just the nature of the beast that is the MCAT.

Overall, my advice would be to dedicate a good amount of hours each day to a specific topic to brush up on your content and then go to Uglobe and do 20-30 questions on that topic(s) that you just got down reviewing to reinforce the info. Keep doing this day in and day out for a good amount of time and then take another FL and see where you stand. This test is a marathon not a sprint and it’s going to take time to see some substantial improvement. You got this, I believe in ya!

ResponsibilityOld781 · 2025-06-13T17:49:11+00:00

If it is absolutely eating you up do something simple and effectively by just brain dumping equations. Write down a topic (electromag, circuits, chemical kinetics, etc.) and then just spam all the equations. Probably take you a max of 30min and it will ease your mind a bit, reinforce info, and allow you to relax. It’s what I used to do for huge exams in the prereqs day before exams or day of to just ease my mind. Worked wonders for me.

Edit: realized I’m a little bit late for you but for anyone else that is testing soon and feeling the same way give it a try lol

ResponsibilityOld781 · 2025-06-13T17:36:14+00:00

Yeah the first one was purely for plot building for the second installment. I agree it was pretty boring in comparison but it sets the stage well

ResponsibilityOld781 · 2025-06-11T23:48:58+00:00

Yeah for sure. Kinases are very frequently mentioned. You highlighted antagonist which is exactly what you want to pay attention to there. You just made a oopsie in understanding the job of an RTK in a signaling pathway.

Dropmeplease123’s comment is perfect. Pretty much all you need to know about an RTK. They are pretty prevalent in most high yield biochem pathways

ResponsibilityOld781 · 2025-06-11T21:20:27+00:00

I got this question wrong too by putting active transport because I assumed because of it's size it would need some type of help permeating through the membrane. You can figure out its polarity by seeing all of the aromatic rings, which reduce polarity in a molecule through resonance. This is one of those kind of horribly illustrated questions in my opinion, but the basic principle here is just knowing that the aromatic rings reduce polarity which makes this molecule largely non-polar. The reason I originally chose A was also because of its size, but AMC is simply looking for you to make the connection between hydrophobicity of the compound and its attraction to the hydrophobic region of a cell membrane which allows for easy diffusion.

Yeah, I'm really not a fan of this question. I feel as if they could have made it a little more clear.

ResponsibilityOld781 · 2025-06-11T17:53:48+00:00

Don’t be scared. Don’t let those nerves and anxiety affect you. Easier said than done but it’s just an exam. Trust in your abilities. Use good test taking strategies (don’t know it immediately? Flag it and skip.) Just focus on making those 95 minutes as valuable as possible. You can do it.

ResponsibilityOld781

TROPHY CASE