An MCAT passage may outwardly resemble a scientific article, but a scientific journal won't make itself difficult to understand on purpose. Within an MCAT passage, things are difficult on purpose all the time. The person writing an MCAT passage is like your opponent in game theory. They are making puzzles from topical and interdisciplinary learning goals you encounter in the flow of reading. You can learn to recognize these puzzles and even learn to predict most of the questions coming ahead of time. To prepare you for MCAT mastery, we have developed an interdisciplinary content review video course encompassing the topical and interdisciplinary goals of the test. For applying your knowledge in exam conditions, we teach a method called MCAT Passage Reader Response in Premed Village.
In a spiraling curriculum, important themes are introduced early, and returned to with greater sophistication as the course progresses. Following AAMC's "Foundations of Living Systems" philosophy, years of teaching and development have produced a content review here relevant to the deeper learning goals of the MCAT. Physics unfolds into chemistry in this MCAT course, building a physical sciences foundation purpose-made for understanding biochemistry as the course progresses. Each AAMC topic is covered "in itself" in the course sequence but also "for the rest" in the light of important interdisciplinary themes.
AAMC's Foundations of Living Systems approach to MCAT design has the purpose of helping you remediate undergraduate science before medical school. In the textbook paradigm the general sciences are taught as modular, disconnected courses by the separate departments. You can take them in any order. However, the world of medical school reflects the molecular biology revolution. The paradigm has shifted. Whenever a biological process occurs, physics and chemistry facts are always changing too. In addition to topical goals, the MCAT is designed to reflect interdisciplinary learning goals. MCAT passage mastery reflects a unified, scientific imagination.
My name is John Wetzel. How am I qualified to make an MCAT course? Premed Village is actually my third MCAT course. After graduating from Stanford in the early 1990's, I made a live coure in Atlanta called MCAT Academy and then created an online course, WikiPremed, which became popular for the old exam. After 2015, I taught full and part-time for nearly a decade to make this course. It has been what I have had to do. When the new MCAT came out in 2015, I also did develop a second career as a contract scientific editor for clinical trials. In this role, I use the medical writing track to help pharma companies speed clinical development and mitigate trial risk. The technical and scientific editing of protocols, statistical analysis plans, and clinical study reports is very relevant in helping me grow in understanding the intentionality of MCAT passage writers. My last job in pharma was to serve a year as contract QC Writing Manager 2023-24 for the Bill and Melinda Gates Medical Research Institute (Gates-MRI) where I helped them build their new medical writing department.