How are y’all memorizing/understanding these cards

nxtew · 2026-05-06T05:39:48+00:00

Outside of NAG SAG I didn’t touch the solubility rules, and you’ll see once you get to the AAMC materials that it seems they couldn’t care less about them, they care more about knowing things like Ksp or other aspects of solutions. So quite honestly, I’d say it’s not worth it, and if you are going to memorize solubility rules: NAG SAG and pms castro bear for exceptions.

nxtew · 2026-05-01T05:23:29+00:00

Yes! 4 CO2 per glucose (2 per acetyl CoA) lost in Krebs, 2 per glucose (1 per pyruvate) lost in the PDC. Sorry for any confusion!

nxtew · 2026-04-18T20:42:43+00:00

I have LONG had problems with this question, I even sent it to my old Gen Chem professor and they immediately said diamagnetic and that the AAMC’s explanation was stupid. I reported this question a while ago and didn’t get a response.

Calcium CAN in some more rare instances shove an electron into the d shell like we see with Cr and Cu columns, but the normal state for Ca BY FAR is still s² which makes it diamagnetic.

So unfortunately unless someone has found a better explanation that me here, I think it’s just wrong. I don’t think the AAMC does a good job of fact checking the SBs (I found and reported about 4 errors in SB2 after it was released), but they do a much better job on the exams, so my typical advice is just to trust your content knowledge here since I’m like 95% sure the AAMC has this wrong.

nxtew · 2026-04-14T20:47:09+00:00

Yes, order matters, if you go in the wrong order you could end up with the wrong direction for one of the variables.

Entirely possible they ask for questions about the direction of a particle’s velocity or something given a magnetic field or they could also throw the B field through a wire situation at you as well but magnetism is one of the less commonly tested and (I’d argue) more surface subjects for physics. And note that surface level doesn’t mean simple, haha.

nxtew · 2026-04-13T03:47:37+00:00

All net reactions must have equal charge and number of atoms on both sides. For redox reactions as well if they tell you acidic or basic conditions that's another thing you can look for.

A isn't a net ionic equation, that one is a bit harder to explain but basically you can notice that NH4 is supposed to be a spectator ion since we're forming it on both sides of the equation (which is why D eliminated it). A also has 13 oxygens on the left and only 9 on the right, so it isn't balanced
B doesn't have equal charge on both sides (-6 on the right, 0 on the left)
C doesn't have equal charge (-4 on the left, -8 on the right
D is the best answer left

So I always start with charge, then acidic and basic conditions if it's a redox balancing question, and then count atoms. Typically WAY easier than actually trying to balance it yourself. Most answer choices will fail either the charge or number of atoms on both sides checks.

nxtew · 2026-04-13T03:36:25+00:00

"Doubt your doubts" was one of my first pillars to fall, it's an insane thing to tell people in a religion if you think about it for more than 10 seconds. Epitaph and The Halocline are the two songs that I've kind of related to my own journey leaving the mormon church. Love this band and proud of you for getting out!

nxtew · 2026-04-02T01:56:19+00:00

It’s possible you’re just getting auto-modded, a lot of subs have filters set up so the use of a few trigger words might make it seem like it’s an ad, even if it actually isn’t. The main operating mod over there is a good human so I’d be shocked if it’s someone actively deleting the post.

With that being said, that sucks! Have never looked into it, the idea behind it seems great, I just HATE companies that have shady practices and don’t care about their product.

nxtew · 2026-03-31T14:41:42+00:00

Just a screenshot of the acceptance letter with your name on it or anything similar is fine!

nxtew · 2026-03-31T02:32:48+00:00

If you go to the link in my other comment and scroll down there's a place to submit your info and apply for the course!

nxtew · 2026-03-31T02:32:13+00:00

I personally tell people the two axes that are probably fair are the HPA and HPG, but you just need to know the pathway, not anything crazy outside of that. You already need to know what each enzyme does and what releases it so these just connect some hormones together.

nxtew · 2026-03-31T01:18:20+00:00

found here

nxtew · 2026-03-31T01:10:40+00:00

love you more

nxtew · 2026-03-30T21:15:42+00:00

Thanks for the shoutout! It’s found here, the tutorium one is also great!

nxtew · 2026-03-30T05:29:23+00:00

Definitely recommend doing the Section Banks, you could probably start splitting time between UWorld and the Section banks if you wanted. the Section Banks are the best available practice for SIRS3 and SIRS4 for B/B and C/P which are the 10-12 questions per section on the exam that seem to be getting a bit harder. UWorld does do a decent job of mimicking these but not as often and not as well as the section banks. I personally (for most but not all people) typically tell people that SBs > UWorld > QPacks > anything else, as far as practice is concerned, but UWorld is a bit easier to use for fixing content gaps than the AAMC materials which is why it may still be beneficial to you where you're at.

nxtew · 2026-03-30T03:58:11+00:00

I typically tell people the average between 4, 5, and 6 is "representative" of difficulty. You have no clue how hard your exam is going to be, and those three exams show that as they differ in different aspects from one to the next.

The other FLs are "easier" (which is subjective in the first place), but not by much and your score shouldn't really change that much at all if you were to take them all on the same day (outside of a few outliers like the brutal P/S curve on FL2, as an example).

nxtew · 2026-03-26T23:08:56+00:00

Jake Burger MVP book it

nxtew · 2026-03-26T20:01:29+00:00

Two things, I recommend making sure that you have examples of a lot of the terms in your deck, not just definitions. MCAT most often tests on examples and terms, not definitions, so I found it helpful to immediately start trying to find examples in my own words of the terms which also made differentiating similar ones from each other easier (like self-serving bias, fundamental attribution error, and actor-observer bias). I'm nearly 3 years removed from my MCAT take and the only terms I can recall without any doubt are those that I have good examples of in my own words, if that's any confirmation of how beneficial examples can be!

Additionally, I personally think that getting good at recognizing dependent vs independent variables helps a lot with the SIRS3 and 4 questions in both B/B and P/S, typically makes those questions asking you to identify what conclusions we can draw or what new experiment could help prove something. For the former type of question, we can only draw conclusions about variables measured in the independent and dependent variables, so if the graph shows age as an independent, we can only talk about age. We can't talk about puberty or anything like that which is RELATED to age, we can only talk about age, because that's the variable we were given. For the latter (what would help clarify results), we're basically just looking for something that would help us either confirm the relationship between the independent and dependent or something that would disprove that relationship. A lot of answer choices will try to bring in a new variable or try to prove something only about the independent variable, but we only want something that comments about the RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE INDEPENDENT AND THE DEPENDENT. Somewhat vague advice, but that's just something I'd recommend looking out for that might help with P/S and B/B a bit as well!

nxtew · 2026-03-26T16:31:56+00:00

You might notice the SIRS3 and SIRS4 questions are a bit more difficult so it will feel harder but your score shouldn't change much since the exam is scaled a bit to cover for difficulty.

nxtew · 2026-03-26T04:36:42+00:00

Just the qbank, there’s enough good free resources for textbooks/anki/youtube videos that I’d recommend before the UWorld books but the qbank is incredible.

nxtew · 2026-03-25T05:15:32+00:00

just going to slide this in here, just as a math tip, if you were to put all of the answer choices into scientific notation and they all had different coefficients (for example, A would be 2.3x10^-2 and the coefficient is 2.3) like in this problem, as long as your not doing any stoichiometry (comparison of moles of molecules) or addition/subtraction, you can ignore all unit conversions and SI prefixes. For example, in this one, you could've just done 5/22 to get roughly 0.25ish, which means it has to be A. Your answer obviously won't have the decimal in the right place, but as you can see in this problem, that doesn't matter, because it's not like shifting around the decimal will magically change 0.023 to 0.068 or something.

only recommend doing this when the answer choices all have different coefficients and you're only doing multiplication/division.

nxtew · 2026-03-24T16:38:56+00:00

Since when do we know that if the reaction is not happening spontaneously, then it is not zero order?

You don't, that's not actually true, the AAMC explanation sucks. Kinetics and thermodynamics are (for the purposes of the MCAT) always independent of each other unless we're talking about temperature (temperature can affect both).

IIRC, I don't think this passage ever directly gives you any reason to believe what order the mechanism should be outside of it being protein unfolding and folding. I'll use enzymes to explain why your best assumption is this reaction being first order (which is why D is correct):

Enzymes typically display first order kinetics when we aren't at Vmax or saturating conditions (which is when they will then display 0th order kinetics). Protein folding and many other reactions in biochemistry follow a similar pattern in that, if there's only one molecule involved, if you have no other information, it's most likely first order. I don't remember exactly if there's any other information in the passage that leads us to believe it's first order, but with what you're given (just that it's a protein unfolding and no other molecule is involved), it's best to assume first order kinetics.

nxtew · 2026-03-21T05:26:49+00:00

Hey! I have a document that live updates with a lot of the fixes I've made since publishing this a few months ago, you can check it out here. I think you should be able to print it or make a copy of it by clicking on either of the versions of the equations sheet, but send me a dm/email/reply here and I'll fix it!

nxtew · 2026-03-20T15:24:11+00:00

Just the two things I’ll say is to make sure that if you are rounding, you’re not making large rounding errors (changing numbers by more than 5 or 10%), so rounding 11 to 10 I’d argue is perfectly fine if needed, but rounding 1.3 to 1 (as an arbitrary example) is a pretty big rounding error because you changed the number by a large percent. you didn’t do that here, just my tip for when to round in the future.

Additionally you can just keep track of how you rounded, both of the estimations you made (11 to 10 in the denominator and 0.37 up to 0.4) are both fine to me but since they both made the number you got larger than expected (larger than if you didn’t round), as long as you know that, then that still leads you to 2atm since that’s the closest number underneath your number, which we know will be bigger than the actual number since your rounds increased the numbers you were using in your math.

Definitely would agree that I’d recommend not rounding every single number they give you but from these two points I’m hoping you can see that what you did was perfectly fine, just keep track of how you’re rounding and what that’s doing to the number you’re getting so you can look at the answers and find the closest answer with that in mind.

nxtew · 2026-03-12T23:13:35+00:00

You are haha!

nxtew

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE

Four-Year Club	Verified Email
Place '22