PCAT vs KAPLAN?

[FatticusInch]

Hey guys, sorry if this is a repetitive question. I got 2 free online practice tests with Kaplan and took the first one today. I intend to review more tonight, then doing another practice test tomorrow before my PCAT on the 8th. What I want to ask is how representative is the Kaplan test to the real deal?

The scores I received:

433/96 Composite
436/93 Biological Processes
424/83 Chemical Processes
429/93 Critical Reading
443/97 Quantitative Reasoning

Any thoughts on how this might change on the actual exam? My main problems aside from Ochem is misreading questions

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[FatticusInch]

Update for the next person who has the same question I did:

I took my exam today and I have to say that Kaplan's math section is not sufficient in representing the actual difficulty of the exam. I highly recommend investing time in learning the typical question tropes and elimination/general test taking strategies for this section. I've a very strong background in math and mental computations and approached it the traditional way of cranking out the answer before selecting. There's no way you can complete this section on time with that approach. The rest of the exam was more or less the same, with more specificity on microbiology than Kaplan's. Chemistry was a tad easier than Kaplan I guess? It's always been my weakest subject in science but I did well. Here are my scores so that you can estimate the differences:

444/99 Composite
440/94 Biological Processes
487/99 Chemical Processes
426/93 Critical Reading
423/85 Quantitative Reasoning

 

[OD2018]

How heavy was the microbiology? Are they asking about certain drugs also?

 

[FatticusInch]

How heavy was the microbiology? Are they asking about certain drugs also?

You should add to your study aspects of microbiology beyond the general structures. Know some common microbes and/or infectious diseases. The Kaplan book does not have a very comprehensive review of microbiology. I would say it's good to know common drug classes and how to identify them. If you've been working as a pharm tech, you should be good to go, I think. I did not review this as I took a quarter of pharmacology 2 years ago.

 

[Medgoal2020]

There was only like 1 question on mine...

 

[PharmDtoB816]

How heavy was the microbiology? Are they asking about certain drugs also?

Was there microbiology?? JK...kind of...maybe there were a few super basic questions like structure...maybe one question about symptoms and disease... I don't remember seeing many microbio questions st all... all Kaplan practice questions about drugs described their action like "interferes with such and such mechanism" so if you know some basics of micro it's usually pretty easy to deduce the answear...

 

[OD2018]

You should add to your study aspects of microbiology beyond the general structures. Know some common microbes and/or infectious diseases. The Kaplan book does not have a very comprehensive review of microbiology. I would say it's good to know common drug classes and how to identify them. If you've been working as a pharm tech, you should be good to go, I think. I did not review this as I took a quarter of pharmacology 2 years ago.

Was there microbiology?? JK...kind of...maybe there were a few super basic questions like structure...maybe one question about symptoms and disease... I don't remember seeing many microbio questions st all... all Kaplan practice questions about drugs described their action like "interferes with such and such mechanism" so if you know some basics of micro it's usually pretty easy to deduce the answear...

Hey guys, thanks for the reply back. This is going to be my first time taking it soon. So I was wondering if you could give any advice how to go about the chemistry and biology passage-based questions.

 

[FatticusInch]

Hey guys, thanks for the reply back. This is going to be my first time taking it soon. So I was wondering if you could give any advice how to go about the chemistry and biology passage-based questions.

Lots of factors involved here: types of questions, your knowledge of the subject, and your reading ability. The majority of the passages in the chem/bio sections are quite short and you can easily skim through if that's what you usually prefer. For some questions, the information in the passage will be helpful but not necessary to answer the question. These are basically trivia questions and I just dug the answer from my knowledge bank, then glanced over to that section in the passage to verify. Some questions require you to have to look at the passage (referring to specific figures, etc). A fraction of these figures' presentations are typical and you are likely to have encountered them during school but some might be foreign. I thought the passage based questions were easier in comparison to the rest in that less of it is based on trivial knowledge. It's not overly complicated and you can easily make sense of them. The non-passage stuff was much more annoying to me. I took every single upper division biology course at my university and there were some content that I've never encountered before.