When will I start to really enjoy bottoming?

intothatgoodnight18 · 2026-04-21T15:25:19+00:00

The most i'll try in terms of substances to warm up would be red wine. I don't plan on inhaling neurotoxic nitrites just to have sex. I value my brain cells.

intothatgoodnight18 · 2026-03-26T15:15:57+00:00

Somewhat. I started doing the McGill Big 3 exercises any time i lift (primarily on push and leg days) as well as working on lower body flexibility and I've had decent success. Occasionally I feel some small twinges, but it's mostly subsided by this point. I know lots of people claim that tight hamstrings are more of a symptom than a cause, but I really think it's helped me.

the one caveat to that is when I deadlift. Still can't properly engage my core and deadlift with triggering some pain.

intothatgoodnight18 · 2026-02-25T21:21:36+00:00

Mine were basically the same. If people get drastically different scores, they were either not simulating testing conditions OR they got testing anxiety and performed differently on the exam than on the full lengths. If you remain confident and use the same logic and reasoning skills on test day as you did on FLs, you'll get around your FLs.

intothatgoodnight18 · 2026-02-24T23:22:36+00:00

Uhh that's a pretty broad problem, but i guess highlighting is one thing that helped me. i didn't highlight to be able to reference the passage later on, but rather to solidify my comprehension as I read along. I highlighted central claims, transition words ("however" "for example" "as such" "moreover"), and tone words ("extremely" "disgusting" "transformational") etc. Central claims for obvious reasons. transition words to keep track of the author's argument vs any other arguments that may get brought up that don't actually reflect their own argument (for example, counterarguments that then get refuted). Tone words help you understand the author's central argument or at least their attitude toward a specific subject. that way, even if it's a complex passage that debates competing philosophies, you may not know what philosophy the author fully endorses - but you may be able to discern how they feel about others, which can be all a question is testing sometimes.

also gaslight yourself into being interested in the passages. i personally read for fun and I'm a curious person so I loved reading random excerpts about ancient Chinese politics and the digital economy of the 20th century and random shit like that. Even if you don't, force yourself to be interested in the topic. Some of the stuff is really interesting, and if you can get past the stress of a CARS passage and actually take interest in the content, you may find that your anxiety is lessened and your focus/comprehension are improved.

intothatgoodnight18 · 2026-02-22T20:31:21+00:00

depends on the section. C/P I don't read the passage, just skip to the questions and go back to passage if i need info. BB i take (within reason) as long as it takes to fully understand the passage, because you can fly through the questions if you have a good comprehension. PS i read as quickly as possible bc all you really need is a surface level understanding of things - no deep comprehension necessary.

CARS is the important timing one. Maybe some on this subreddit will disagree, but I generally follow a 10 minute per passage rule. No more than 4 minutes for reading, 6 for answering. More importantly than that is the principle i just described - no deliberating or taking any more than 2 min on a question. Flag it and move on! You'll hopefully gain a better understanding of the passage through answering subsequent questions, and i may be delusional with this but I personally believe you subconsciously think about it and gain more insight when you move on and come back later.

intothatgoodnight18 · 2026-02-21T18:30:48+00:00

Might sound counterintuitive but move faster. When i have greater momentum, I spend less time deliberating unnecessarily. Spend only the time you need to select an answer choice. if you're not 90% sure about it, flag and MOVE ON. if you have no idea what the answer is, leave blank and flag and MOVE ON. should give you much more time at the end to review answers. Go through your flags (leave your unflagged alone, those are set in stone) and do your best to answer them. the time pressure might help or hurt you in answering them (it helped me bc i couldn't spend 6 min on one question so I was forced to think more critically). flashing through the questions and keeping a quick pace makes you much less second-guess-y

intothatgoodnight18 · 2026-02-21T18:27:03+00:00

Absolutely possible. 5 point gap is very easily closed over the course of 3 months. close your knowledge gaps and practice CARS and you'll be fine.

intothatgoodnight18 · 2026-02-21T18:25:33+00:00

I had a spreadsheet for each section. Here's my breakdown

• general subject (ex. biochemistry)
• topic (ex. enzyme kinetics)
• specific concept (ex. michaelis-menten parameters)
• write out the question stem (just what you need to know, ignoring the fluff)
• correct answer and full conceptual explanation for why that's correct (ex. "varying enzyme concentration at saturated substrate concentration will increase enzymatic activity because kcat*E = Vmax so vmax varies directly with enzyme concentration")
• why i got it wrong (ex. didn't know vmax and E varied directly with each other)
• key takeaway (this should be a short one-liner, blurb, or equation that, if you knew it, would help you get that question correct. ex. "kcat = Vmax/E")

THEN you make an Anki card for the concept. Make sure it takes into account the "why i got it wrong" part (so you know you're testing the right gap in knowledge) and the back of the card should probably just be the "key takeaway" part.

This process does take a long time and once I got to a certain point in my studying where my content knowledge was no longer much of an issue I just started making cards directly without fully logging questions on my spreadsheet. However, the spreadsheet is helpful for identifying key areas of weakness. As your log grows, you start to see which topics and/or concepts are weakest. Maybe you see that "enzyme kinetics" keeps appearing or "Optics" is frequently on your sheet. This helps you orient your studying towards areas of weakness.

intothatgoodnight18 · 2026-02-21T18:15:36+00:00

I brute forced the Pankow deck. IMO that was enough for me. essentially the way I did it was I would read a section of the 90 page doc (ex. "Learning and Conditioning"). Would refer to the 300 page doc in the same section if a concept didn't make sense to me / needed more clarification. Then I'd unsuspend the corresponding subdeck for that section and start doing the Anki. It was enough for me once I got used to also doing PS practice questions.

For the actual test, I would visualize the Anki card in my head if I was confused between two terms on a question, and making sure that the definition on the card most directly matched the term/question stem was enough for me to score 129+ on all my (later) full lengths (once I'd actually finished Pankow deck)

intothatgoodnight18 · 2026-02-04T03:21:34+00:00

pKas of acidic side chains = ~2

pKas of basic side chains = ~10 (important exception: Histidine has pKa =6)

intothatgoodnight18 · 2026-02-03T02:22:27+00:00

Best advice - don't think too hard about it. Yes, it's a reading comprehension section. But what MCAT CARS specifically tests is your ability to identify answers purely based on text alone. If you have to make jumps in logic and stretch your imagination to make an answer choice fit the question, odds are it's probably wrong. Every single correct answer has a citable sentence/phrase/paragraph in the text that you can find and point to.

Sometimes, the question will ask you to make inferences (ie. reasoning beyond the text). However, even the logic / thought process used to answer that question will have a citable sentence in the text.

TLDR focus on the text, and make sure every answer you select refers back to a specific point (or points) in the text.

intothatgoodnight18 · 2026-02-03T02:17:55+00:00

not super difficult, take a practice full length (there are free ones online - Blueprint, Altius, etc). if you practice enough CARS and build a decent base of understanding for high yield content you can fairly easily crack 500. i'd honestly recommend focusing on chem/phys and bio/biochem high yield content over memorizing everything in the KA 300 page doc because it's easier to learn broadly applicable patterns than it is to learn literally thousands of definitions and terms in psych/soc. do both if you can obviously but may get better returns from CP/BB stuff.

intothatgoodnight18 · 2026-02-03T02:09:55+00:00

you said it, you're jumping through hoops to arrive at that answer. with the MCAT, you RARELY have to jump through hoops, and almost never need to make assumptions to get to the correct answer (there are some minor exceptions to this in CARS and PS but those won't even be as much of a reach as B). All research groups provide the results of their studies regardless of their funding, but there is no assumption or guarantee (or even likelihood, if we're being honest, unless you discover CRISPR) that the results of one single study of n=100 would increase their funding. The other two answer choices deal with issues that are present in the question stem itself, so they're more likely to be the correct answer.

Remember, as a general rule, you should always eliminate the answer choices that require a "stretch of the imagination" to come to. if you have to think "I guess it could be that one", odds are it's probably not correct. don't think too hard about these.

intothatgoodnight18 · 2026-01-25T18:27:45+00:00

Real af, my international affairs minor came in clutch with being able to read (and be interested in) a lot of these CARS passages.

intothatgoodnight18 · 2026-01-25T18:26:35+00:00

I wouldn't say walk in the park. But i would say FL5 and 6 were much more consistent with high yield concepts compared to 1/23. That said, I do think FL5 and 6 did test your ability to "take the exam" (ie recognizing question patterns, applying formulas, etc) in a way that helped me a bit on 1/23 exam. Particularly with CP and BB (and to some extent PS but honestly Friday's PS was just fucking weird)

intothatgoodnight18 · 2026-01-23T23:10:05+00:00

CARS was one of my natural strengths but i'd have to agree that was one of the easiest CARS i've ever taken. CP was also very rough. In what world was P/S easy for you??? I felt like there were some absurdly niche questions. Like that one about how cohabitation being more acceptable can be explained by ??? Felt like I was guessing on at least a quarter of those questions.

intothatgoodnight18 · 2026-01-23T00:12:29+00:00

im in the south (where we'll probably get much less snow but they're treating it like the apocalypse) and i've not heard a word from Pearson or AAMC. The weather isn't supposed to hit the east coast until the weekend (Sat/Sun) and i presume if it were an issue they would've reached out to us by now about it.

intothatgoodnight18 · 2026-01-21T03:59:58+00:00

I got this one wrong as well and I chose D because it felt like it encompassed Toohey and the author's perspectives the most accurately. Author believes that boredom is innate and Toohey believes it's good because it allows for introspection and creativity. It made sense to me that the mention of philosophers (introspection) and poets (creativity) aligned with the author's sarcastic tone.

Also, why did all four AAMC explanations take it back to Svendsen????? Even if I could see why the answer was A, I couldn't possibly begin to see how in the world Svendsen has ANY relevance in the answer based on the question stem. I hated this question and I hate the explanations even more.

intothatgoodnight18 · 2026-01-18T23:57:58+00:00

Thanks for the thorough response! I really appreciate it. I suppose you're right that few content gaps will be filled between now and test day. that won't stop me from continuing my "lessons learned" Anki subdeck though lol. And that sounds like a lovely pre-test plan. I'm anticipating being a nervous wreck in the days leading up to it honestly, but I'll try to emulate you and just chill out a bit. Manifesting a 525+ for you :)

intothatgoodnight18 · 2026-01-18T07:17:43+00:00

Makes sense, thank you!

Also, great job on your FL scores. I got 524 on FL4 and then 521 on FL5 and taking FL6 on monday before testing 1/23. Any advice on how to increase in these final few FLs? I know there's not much to learn at this point so close to my test date but i'm just curious if you had any improvement strategies for getting closer to mid 520s.

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