Session 167 The AAMC Outline shows you what you are expected to know for the MCAT. But is that all you need to know? Plus, some psychology/sociology material! We're joined by Phil from . If you're looking for some tutoring, contact Next Step Test Prep directly and talk to them. Listen to this podcast episode with the player above, or keep reading for the highlights and takeaway points. [02:00] Getting the Most of Your Psych/Soc Section From the AAMC Outline The AAMC has this outline on what's on the MCAT exam. It contains about 128 pages so it's a huge outline. Some of those are not as useful a prep tool as others. The Psychology/Sociology (P/S) section is testing your knowledge of vocabulary. The outline gives you what stuff they're going to be asking you about and what stuff they're going to expect you to know. But it doesn't mean they can't ask you anything outside of that. The AAMC has practice materials that you've never heard of and they expect you not to have seen that. You just have to go to the passage and pull stuff out of it. The questions are not testing your knowledge. They're just testing your ability to read and learn and understand what's going in this experiment. That being said, there's other stuff they expect you to know and they're going to hold you accountable for it. Phil had a student who was strong across the board except for the Psych area. They worked on this outline and he let the student explain in their own words with their own examples. They spent a whole month and took a bunch of practice tests. She got from 124 to 131 on the practice test. And she got a 132 on the actual test, which is the perfect score. Since then, he had done this with ten other students and five of them had gotten perfect scores. [Related episode: ] [06:54] Why the Outline Isn't as Useful for the Bio Section and Other Sciences A student should look at the outline for every section. But Phil doesn't think it's as useful as in the Bio section. For instance, they will mention the bioenergetics concentration. But that doesn't really help that much as you don't know what you should be looking at. Of course, you have to look it up and figure out what's going on. A lot of the things on the Psychology/Sociology are just discrete vocabulary and not topics. Whereas a lot of the stuff in the Biology, Chemistry, and Physics sections are more of topics than vocab stuff. In the Physics section, if it talks about the right-hand rule in magnetism and the equation for the magnetic field. Writing out the magnetic field and the equation isn't merely as useful as doing practice questions. Whereas in the Psych section, they're testing the vocab stuff. If you can go through and write out the vocab definition of all these things, it's going to mesh better with what the MCAT is going to ask when it comes to those. [09:05] Understanding the Importance of Focusing on the P/S Section The P/S section is something you just have to know a ton of. In fact, there are more psychology questions than you do physics and chemistry questions combined. But people are ignoring Psych and spend a month focusing on Physics. This is pervasive across the board. This changes the way it's scored as the MCAT is a curved exam. If everyone is not putting in a lot of effort in Psych, then everyone is doing okay in Psych because it's an even thing. But if there's any section where a little effort will raise a score the most, it's the P/S section. That's because nobody is spending any time on this. [Related episode: ] [13:54] Understanding Some Psych Terms: Sensation vs. Perception Sensation and perception are two different things. A sensation is neurologic-based. If you activate a neuron, that signal gets sent to your brain. It's possible to sense something but not perceive it. There are different thresholds, which would be another vocab term. There's the threshold of sensation and the threshold of perception. So you want to make sure you know the difference between