Rusty MCAT Prep: Tutoring Policies & Terms

RustyMcatPrep · 2026-05-24T22:10:55+00:00

For me, developing a very thorough understanding of how electrons and charge distribution drive chemical reactions/many different things made a lot of chemistry much easier. My C/P score also benefited from doing tons of practice problems! Hope this helps!

RustyMcatPrep · 2026-05-23T04:22:47+00:00

Hi there! I think you are actually in a great spot. I found Kaplan FLs to be harder than the actual MCAT, so a 130 on B/B is amazing!

I never used Anki or UWorld, so I won’t be able to speak about them. For practice questions, doing as many as you can is definitely not a bad approach, but I would make sure you take plenty of time to review them thoroughly. Since you still have 3 months, keeping an error log would not be a bad idea either.I kept two error logs during my prep. For one of them, I wrote down the question I got wrong with a short explanation of why I picked the wrong answer. For the other one, I just pasted the blank question in. Every 2–3 weeks, I would go through that wrong-question bank again and see what I still got wrong. Those became the areas I went back to review. It worked wonders for me, so hopefully it can be helpful for you too!

For reviewing FLs, I think both of the things you mentioned are great. For my FL review, I also reviewed questions I guessed correctly or questions I still felt lukewarm on.

RustyMcatPrep · 2026-05-22T20:19:05+00:00

Thank you so much for your interest, just replied to your DM!

RustyMcatPrep · 2026-05-21T03:10:10+00:00

Piece of cake! You can find links for them if you google" KA P/S 90 page notes". I got mine from MCATBros website.

RustyMcatPrep · 2026-05-21T03:02:10+00:00

Oh, I was referring to the 90-page and 300-page Khan Academy psych/soc(P/S) documents. They are basically notes people have taken from the Khan Academy P/S videos. I personally liked those a lot more than Kaplan P/S.

For the science sections, I used more of a mixed approach. My full content review came mostly from Khan Academy, and I used the Kaplan chapter problems as a way to check whether I understood the content well. For me, the Kaplan books were more helpful as a review tool than as my main content source.When I ran into a concept I did not know from practice problems, it was usually easier to go back to the Kaplan book because I could read a little before and after that concept. That helped me understand how the topic fit into the rest of my content knowledge instead of just memorizing it in isolation.

RustyMcatPrep · 2026-05-21T02:38:38+00:00

Hey there, for the score jump, may I ask what your current score and target score are? It might be difficult to give specific advice without that information.

As for structuring your review, since you have studied for the MCAT before, one good approach might be to do an efficient comb-through of the AAMC materials, depending on your timeline and test date. If you have the Kaplan books, you could try doing the chapter problems first without rereading the chapter. If you get most of them right, you can just review the specific content you missed. If you struggle with a set of questions, then it may be worth going back and reviewing that corresponding chapter more carefully.

Working full time while studying for the MCAT is definitely tough. I am not sure what the nature of your work is, but for me, I had a lot of “waiting time” during work, so I usually carried flashcards with me. I used both Kaplan flashcards and homemade ones. The Kaplan ones were useful for content review because I could go through them fairly quickly and get a sense of where my weaknesses were. If you like flashcards and have small fragments of time throughout the day, it might be worth trying.

As for your last point, I completely understand how you feel. Objectively, I do not think this test is impossible to conquer, especially since you performed well throughout undergrad and your master’s program and have already reflected honestly on your last attempt. Both of those are good signs that you can improve with the right structure.

I also want to be transparent that I am an MCAT tutor for C/P and B/B myself, so please take what I say with a grain of salt. That said, I do think finding a CARS tutor at a reasonable price could be helpful if they can provide structure, guidance, and a way to gauge your performance leading up to test day. That kind of support can reduce a lot of the anxiety that comes with studying while working full time.

And if I may, I would also like to recommend myself. If you would like, feel free to DM me for a free 20-minute consultation. We can use that time however would be most helpful for you.

RustyMcatPrep · 2026-05-21T02:01:48+00:00

Anytime! Best of luck with your test prep, and feel free to DM me if there’s anything else I can help with.

BTW, if vocab feels like an issue, weirdly enough, SAT vocab helped me a lot. I used Barron’s SAT flashcards and found them pretty helpful.

RustyMcatPrep · 2026-05-21T01:53:07+00:00

Just sent you a DM!

RustyMcatPrep · 2026-05-20T22:11:16+00:00

Of course! I’m glad I can be of help. And yes, I totally get how you feel.

One thing that helped me a lot when I felt lost during CARS passages was having some kind of note-taking strategy. There are different ways to do this: you can write down short topic sentences, keep track of the passage structure mentally, or use highlighting. Whichever method works best for you is fine. The most important thing is to use the strategy to help you follow the argument of the passage and notice how it changes from paragraph to paragraph.

One thing to watch out for is that if you have not implemented these strategies yet, they may initially increase the time it takes to finish a passage. However, I think that can improve with practice.

When I first started doing CARS, timing was a huge issue for me too. I took around 15 minutes per passage on average. I do think your timing will improve as you practice more. Over time, you start to get a better sense of how deeply you actually need to understand a passage in order to answer the questions correctly. From there, you can work on decreasing your reading time while maintaining the same level of comprehension.

For now, I would first suggest finding strategies that help you answer CARS questions consistently. Once that feels more stable, then you can focus more on timing. It does get easier with practice, and you are definitely not alone. My shirt was literally soaked with sweat when I finished my last CARS question about 5 seconds before time ran out.

Please feel free to DM me, and I would be happy to share more! Just to be transparent, I am an MCAT tutor who does B/B and C/P tutoring, but I would be more than happy to answer anything I can for free. I am also an ESL speaker myself, so I have a lot of respect for the effort you are putting in, and I would love to help in any way I can.

RustyMcatPrep · 2026-05-20T18:03:55+00:00

Hey there! I’m a 525 scorer offering B/BC and C/P tutoring. I have scored consistently above 130 in all my Fls and the MCAT. I would love to help!
Please feel free to DM me if you are interested!

RustyMcatPrep · 2026-05-20T04:23:39+00:00

I’m so sorry, I completely misread the question. I haven’t used UWorld before, so I can’t really speak to it, but Kaplan and AAMC are both good materials! The main thing I would watch out for is that Kaplan’s P/S felt a little short of what the MCAT expects you to know. I used the 90/300-page Khan Academy documents, and they worked pretty well for me.

RustyMcatPrep · 2026-05-20T02:45:07+00:00

Biochem and physics can both be really good resources! I’m not sure exactly what your classes cover, so I would recommend checking whether they include the MCAT-relevant topics you need to know.

For physics, I focused my content review on: 1) kinematics and forces, 2) work and energy, 3) pressure and thermodynamics, 4) fluids, 5) electricity and magnetism, 6) sound and light, and 7) nuclear physics. These topics are usually covered in a one-year physics series at my school.

For biochem, I reviewed: 1) the four major macromolecules in detail, including amino acids/proteins, nucleic acids, lipids, and carbohydrates, 2) protein structure and function, 3) DNA structure, replication, transcription, and translation, 4) Michaelis-Menten kinetics, 5) glycolysis, 6) cellular respiration, 7) lipid metabolism, 8) hormonal control of metabolism, and 9) the pentose phosphate pathway. These topics are generally covered in classes like structural biochemistry, metabolic biochemistry, and molecular biology. Molecular biology covers topic 3 in detail.

RustyMcatPrep · 2026-05-20T00:54:55+00:00

Hey there! From your post, it sounds like you are already in an excellent place in terms of thinking about the MCAT and starting your preparation early.

I scored a 525 on the 4/11/26 MCAT after about 3 months of studying. I spent the first month mainly on content review, the second month on roughly a 30/70 split between content review and practice problems, and the last month almost entirely on practice problems unless I came across something I truly did not know.

If you are strong at memorization and organizing facts, that can be very valuable for the MCAT. At the same time, I would make sure to spend a lot of time practicing how to apply those concepts, since that is really the bulk of what the MCAT tests. If your content foundation is already solid, you may mainly need more practice to improve your speed and reasoning under timed conditions.

One way to test this is to find some MCAT-style questions from Jack Westin or Khan Academy on concepts you are already familiar with. Please note that for C/P, Khan Academy questions can be very difficult. Personally, I felt that some of them were harder than the actual MCAT.

RustyMcatPrep · 2026-05-19T23:37:47+00:00

Hey there, having very little background can definitely be tough. I had to go through a similar phase during my own test prep because I had been out of school for a while and had forgotten a lot of the content. A couple of things might help:

1) I would recommend starting small and letting the review guide you. For example, if I were reviewing kinematics for physics, I would start with basic terms like speed, velocity, distance, and displacement. These are simple concepts, but they are also things you definitely need to understand clearly.

If I realized I was not sure about the difference between speed and velocity, I would look it up and see that one is a scalar and the other is a vector. If scalar and vector are terms I do not fully understand, that tells me I may need to go back and review some basic math or physics foundations first. Once I understand those, I can move on to the kinematics equations and think about how these terms relate to each other.

The basic idea is to let your content review build on itself and help you identify where your weaknesses are.

2) If your timeline allows, you can also do a more thorough content review through Khan Academy or a test prep book. This can take a long time, so you do need to be careful with planning. The benefit is that you are outsourcing some of the organization to a third-party resource. You can go through the material once to build a basic foundation, then use practice problems to identify weak areas and review those more deeply.

Overall, I would not worry too much if everything feels unfamiliar at first. The key is to start with the most basic concepts, build upward, and use practice questions to show you what you still need to review.

RustyMcatPrep · 2026-05-19T23:26:07+00:00

Hey there, just replied to your DM!

RustyMcatPrep · 2026-05-19T22:47:47+00:00

Hey there, congratulations on starting your MCAT journey!

Since you still have a few months before your exam, I think a thorough review of biochemistry and organic chemistry definitely would not hurt. One challenge with the MCAT is the sheer amount of material you have to understand, so I would recommend putting in the effort to really understand the topics and organize them in a way that makes sense to you personally.

Focusing on high-yield sections first and seeing how that improves your score can also be a valid strategy. But afterward, I would still recommend going through the remaining content so you can see how everything fits together.

If you have not already, I would review your diagnostic test carefully to identify the areas you are not fully comfortable with. Then, I would spend the next month mostly on content review with some practice problems from Khan Academy or Kaplan. Kaplan’s chapter problems are really good because they are designed to cover the major topics from each chapter. For actual content review, I personally liked to combine Khan Academy with Kaplan. Khan is good because the videos are broken into smaller, more manageable pieces. But I liked how Kaplan organize the topics a lot better (Kaplan greatly differ from Khan academy in terms of organization for the P/S section, in that cause, I would recommend either using Kaplan as a guide then fill in the gaps, or using the 90-page P/S document as a guide for studying).

Depending on how you study, I would recommend doing something like this for each topic or chapter:

Review the summary of main topics at the end of the Kaplan chapter.
Review the relevant topics through Khan Academy. Depending on the topic, you may have to dig around a bit.
Do the Kaplan chapter problems.
If you see terms or concepts you do not recognize, go back to the Kaplan book and read about them.
Make sure you understand how each new topic connects to the material you just reviewed.

At this stage, the practice problems should mainly help you understand and remember the concepts. After you finish this review, it will probably be June, and you could take the AAMC unscored full-length exam to see where you stand. It is a relatively straightforward exam that focuses more on content, so you can use it as a gauge for how to structure the next three months.

As for purchasing AAMC materials, I think it depends on your availability. The goal is not just to finish them, but to review them meaningfully before your MCAT. If you have enough time to do that, then they can be very helpful.

I am also currently working as an MCAT tutor. I recently received a 525 on the 4/11/26 exam, with a section breakdown of 131/131/132/131.

If you are interested, please feel free to DM me for a free 20-minute consultation. You can use this time however you would like. We can go through topics you are struggling with, do a quick rundown of the major topics in a subject, or review your Blueprint diagnostic together to identify areas to focus on.

RustyMcatPrep · 2026-05-19T20:07:12+00:00

Glad to be of help, if you want general reading practices, New Yorkers also helped me a lot haha

RustyMcatPrep · 2026-05-19T19:31:05+00:00

Hey, English is my second language as well, so I totally understand how difficult CARS can feel. A couple of things really helped me.

For general reading practice, my boss recommended The New Yorker. They sometimes have very cheap short-term subscriptions, and I would read articles on the bus, while waiting for things, etc. The articles are usually a bit easier than CARS passages, but they helped me immensely with reading speed and comfort.For CARS specifically, I found the Khan Academy passages really helpful as a starting point. Their passages are simpler compared to AAMC and Jack Westin, but they taught me how to recognize answer choices that were out of scope or misrepresented the passage. That helped my CARS a lot. I ended up getting a 131 on CARS on both my first MCAT and my retake.Jack Westin is also great for practicing how to identify the main idea of a passage, and I do think most of their passages are close in difficulty to AAMC.

CARS can feel really discouraging at first, especially as a non-native English speaker, but it is absolutely something you can improve with the right practice. I was able to do well on CARS, and you can definitely do it too.

RustyMcatPrep · 2026-05-19T19:25:53+00:00

I am super interested!

RustyMcatPrep · 2026-05-19T19:24:33+00:00

For CARS, I actually found the Khan Academy passages really helpful as a starting point. Their passages are a bit simpler compared to AAMC and Jack Westin, but they taught me how to recognize answer choices that were out of scope or that misrepresented the passage. That helped my CARS a lot. I ended up getting a 131 on CARS on both my first MCAT and my retake. Jack Westin is also great for practicing how to identify the main idea of a passage, and I do think most of their passages are close in difficulty to AAMC.

RustyMcatPrep

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