Biology Forums - Study Force

I'm planning to go to medical school and I want to get the highest score I can on the MCATs. Are there prep classes for this and where can they be taken? Are they expensive and are they worth it or not?

There are home study materials to increase your score or get you prepared for the test.

I had a friend that was going to dental school and she took a prep class in order to do beter on her denatl school exam, its just like the mcats only instead of med school your going to dental school, and I completely forget what the test is called, im surprised because its all she talked about for 2 years, but anyways she took a test at Kaplan, I dont know if thats something that is all over the unitsed states, but when she did her pretest, and then took the actual test after the class, it took her up significantly.  I know the class was about $1000.00.  But it was like once a week for a couple months, and she said it was well worth it.  They also have books and stuff like that but I didnt find them helpful when I took my GRE's I would have rather taken a class.  I also think there are a bunch of different online classes.

Yes there are, and Kaplan is the largest. The reason they are effective is that the training is based on actual test questions. What they do is hire students who are going to take the test, and have each student memorize a group of questions. When the student is finished, they go back to Kaplan and "debrief" the actual questions to Kaplan. Now the boards change their questions frequently, but it does give the actual flavor or difficulty that the student will face. I would use Kaplan

Whether an MCAT class is worth it varies with the location.  At some centers, the teachers are exceptional and can give your a bunch of helpful tips and strategies.  At other centers, the teacher is an undergraduate who is teaching everything.

A previous respondant mentioned Kaplan, and I have to completely disagree with their assessment.  Like any corporate entity trying to provide several different services at several different locations, they sacrifice quality of teaching and materials so they can be the largest.  Their teachers are notoriously poor.  If you go to a site like SDN, then you'll read comments about how useless the lecture part of their course is.  The biggest complaint is that the teacher often just reads from a book and doesn;t knwo their stuff.  The strength of Kaplan seems to be their on-line exams, but that's $1600.

The best services are the small companies that just do MCAT preparation.  At SDN, they seem to rate Berkeley Review (a California company) as being the best in terms of teaching and preparation books.  Actually, they have a pretty extensive set of comments ranking the different books for all of the companies for the different subjects.  BR is top ranked in three of the five and exam krackers is top ranked in the other two.  

If you are in Cali or NYC, then a prep course is definitely worth it, because there are small companies with years of MACT experience.  Anywhere else, it doesn't necessarily seem like the coroporate programs are motivated to offer a great course for the money.