🩺MCAT®

Arrows, ramps, wrenches and pendulums: the mechanics half of Foundational Concept 4, drawn as motion rather than asserted as formulas.

4A. Units, Dimensions, and Dimensional Analysis · 4A. Vectors, Components, and Vector Addition · 4A. Speed, Velocity, and Acceleration · 4A. Projectile Motion · +10 more

Pressure, buoyancy, viscosity and the gas laws, animated on the systems that actually run on them: arteries, alveoli and the air above a mountain.

4B. Density and Specific Gravity · 4B. Hydrostatic Pressure and Pascal's Law · 4B. Buoyancy and Archimedes' Principle · 4B. Surface Tension · +9 more

Fields, circuits and cells, ending where they were always headed: a nerve membrane charging like a capacitor and firing like a switch.

4C. Charge, Conductors, Insulators, and Charge Conservation · 4C. Coulomb's Law · 4C. The Electric Field and Field Lines · 4C. Electric Potential and Electrostatic Energy · +11 more

Waves bending, cancelling, echoing and being absorbed: sound and ultrasound, optics and the eye, and the spectroscopy that reads molecules.

4D. Production of Sound, Its Speed in Media, and Pitch · 4D. Sound Intensity, Decibels, and Attenuation · 4D. The Doppler Effect · 4D. Resonance and Standing Waves in Pipes and Strings · +13 more

Inside the atom and across the table: decay curves, orbitals filling by rule, periodic trends drawn as height, and the stoichiometry that counts it all.

4E. Atomic Number, Atomic Weight, and Isotopes · 4E. Nuclear Forces, Mass Defect, and Binding Energy · 4E. Alpha, Beta, and Gamma Decay · 4E. Half-Life, Exponential Decay, and Semi-Log Plots · +12 more

Acids, bases, buffers, solubility and titration — the chemistry of everything dissolved in the water that living systems actually run on.

5A. Brønsted-Lowry and Lewis Acid-Base Definitions · 5A. Conjugate Acids and Bases · 5A. Ionization of Water, Kw and the pH of Pure Water · 5A. Estimating pH and pOH Without a Calculator · +18 more

Lewis structures, VSEPR shapes, hybrid orbitals, the whole of stereochemistry, and the four forces that decide how molecules stick together.

5B. Lewis Electron Dot Structures · 5B. Formal Charge · 5B. Resonance and Delocalized Electrons · 5B. Electronegativity and Partial Ionic Character · +18 more

Extraction, distillation, every flavor of chromatography and electrophoresis — how a single pure compound or protein is pulled out of a mixture.

5C. Extraction and the Distribution of a Solute Between Immiscible Solvents · 5C. Acid-Base Extraction · 5C. Distillation: Simple, Fractional and Vacuum · 5C. Recrystallization · +12 more

Nucleic acids, amino acids and proteins, lipids and sugars, and the organic chemistry of every carbonyl, alcohol, acid and aromatic ring in a cell.

5D. Nucleotides, Nucleosides and the Sugar Phosphate Backbone · 5D. Purines, Pyrimidines and Base Pairing · 5D. The DNA Double Helix and RNA Structures · 5D. Amino Acid Structure and Absolute Configuration · +34 more

Enzymes and their inhibitors, bioenergetics, the laws of thermodynamics, rate laws and reaction coordinates, and where equilibrium finally settles.

5E. Enzyme Classification by Reaction Type · 5E. Enzyme Specificity, the Active Site and Induced Fit · 5E. Cofactors, Coenzymes and Vitamins · 5E. Michaelis-Menten Kinetics, Km and Vmax · +30 more

Twenty side chains, four levels of folding, and the kinetic curves the MCAT keeps drawing: enzymes, inhibitors, and hemoglobin's sigmoid.

1A. Amino Acid Structure and Absolute Configuration · 1A. Classification of the Twenty Side Chains · 1A. Amino Acids as Dipolar Ions: pKa and Titration · 1A. The Isoelectric Point and Protein Electrophoresis · +17 more

DNA to RNA to protein drawn as machinery: forks that open, introns that loop out, ribosomes that ratchet, and the operons that switch it all on.

1B. Nucleotides, the Sugar-Phosphate Backbone and the Double Helix · 1B. DNA Denaturation, Reannealing and Hybridization · 1B. DNA Replication: Origins, the Fork and Semiconservative Copying · 1B. Leading and Lagging Strands and Okazaki Fragments · +22 more

Meiosis, pedigrees, map distances and Hardy-Weinberg, plus the evolutionary forces that move allele frequencies once equilibrium breaks.

1C. Evidence That DNA Is the Genetic Material · 1C. Genotype, Phenotype, Alleles and Loci · 1C. Complete Dominance, Codominance and Incomplete Dominance · 1C. Penetrance, Expressivity and Multiple Alleles · +15 more

Every carbon and every ATP accounted for: glycolysis, the cycle, beta-oxidation, and the proton gradient that physically turns ATP synthase.

1D. Free Energy, Keq and Spontaneous Reactions · 1D. Coupled Reactions and Le Chatelier's Principle · 1D. ATP Hydrolysis and Phosphoryl Group Transfer · 1D. Biological Oxidation-Reduction and Electron Carriers · +22 more

The membrane as a gate, the organelles as a factory floor, the cytoskeleton as both scaffold and engine, and the tissues they build.

2A. The Fluid Mosaic Model · 2A. Membrane Lipids: Phospholipids, Steroids, and Waxes · 2A. Membrane Proteins and Membrane Dynamics · 2A. Passive Diffusion Across the Membrane · +19 more

Life without a nucleus, how it grows and swaps genes sideways, and the subcellular things that hijack it to reproduce.

2B. Cell Theory · 2B. Prokaryotic Domains: Archaea and Bacteria · 2B. Structure of the Prokaryotic Cell · 2B. Bacterial Shapes and the Cell Wall · +16 more

How one cell becomes two under tight control, how that control breaks in cancer, and how one fertilized egg becomes every tissue you have.

2C. Phases of the Cell Cycle: G0, G1, S, G2, M · 2C. Mitosis: Prophase Through Telophase · 2C. Mitotic Structures and Chromosome Movement · 2C. Control of the Cell Cycle, Checkpoints, and Growth Arrest · +16 more

Two control systems for one body: one that signals in milliseconds down wires, one that signals in hours through the bloodstream.

3A. Organization of the Vertebrate Nervous System · 3A. Sensor and Effector Neurons · 3A. Reflexes, Feedback Loops, and the Reflex Arc · 3A. Sympathetic and Parasympathetic Antagonistic Control · +19 more

Eleven organ systems taken one at a time and then put back together, because in a living body no system works alone.

3B. Structure of the Lungs and Alveoli · 3B. Breathing Mechanisms and Differential Pressure · 3B. Alveolar Gas Exchange and Partial Pressures · 3B. Control of Breathing, pH, and Thermoregulation · +40 more

Every sense from photon to percept: thresholds you can slide, cones you can silence, and a scene that flattens as each depth cue is removed.

6A. Absolute and Difference Thresholds · 6A. Weber's Law · 6A. Signal Detection Theory · 6A. Sensory Adaptation · +21 more

Attention, thinking, consciousness, memory and language: heuristics bending a judgment, a hypnogram across the night, a forgetting curve reset by review.

6B. Selective Attention and the Cocktail-Party Effect · 6B. Divided Attention and Multitasking · 6B. Inattentional and Change Blindness · 6B. The Information-Processing Model · +36 more

Emotion and stress: the same event sent down three rival theories in three different orders, and a resistance curve that runs out of road.

6C. The Three Components of Emotion · 6C. Universal Emotions and Facial Expression · 6C. The Adaptive Role of Emotion · 6C. James-Lange, Cannon-Bard and Schachter-Singer · +9 more

Nervous system, genes, personality, disorders, motivation and attitudes: the machinery under one person's behavior, as circuits, curves and rival models.

7A. Neurons and the Reflex Arc · 7A. Neurotransmitters and Behavior · 7A. The Peripheral Nervous System: Somatic and Autonomic · 7A. The Central Nervous System and the Spinal Cord · +34 more

What other people do to one person's behavior: helping falling as the crowd grows, a judgment sliding to match the group, norms and their sanctions.

7B. Social Facilitation · 7B. Deindividuation · 7B. The Bystander Effect · 7B. Social Loafing · +13 more

Learning as curves: acquisition rising and extinction falling, four reinforcement schedules drawn side by side, a message taking one of two routes.

7C. Habituation and Dishabituation · 7C. Classical Conditioning: the Stimuli and the Responses · 7C. Acquisition, Extinction and Spontaneous Recovery · 7C. Generalization and Discrimination · +13 more

The self drawn as a structure: schemas that reorder by room, three control beliefs that move separately, and six developmental theories animated end to end.

8A. Self-Concept and Self-Schemas · 8A. Self-Identity and the Hierarchy of Salience · 8A. Social Identity and Group Membership · 8A. Self-Esteem · +13 more

Attribution drawn as a spotlight that moves between the person and the situation, and prejudice taken apart into a feeling, a belief, and an act.

8B. Attributing Behavior to Persons or Situations · 8B. The Fundamental Attribution Error · 8B. Self-Serving Bias · 8B. The Role of Culture in Attribution · +9 more

Status, role and group drawn as structures a person is pulled through, plus networks, bureaucracy, self-presentation, attachment and discrimination.

8C. Status: Ascribed, Achieved, and Master · 8C. Roles and Role Sets · 8C. Role Conflict, Role Strain, and Role Exit · 8C. Primary and Secondary Groups · +16 more

Six theoretical lenses turned on the same social fact one at a time, then every social institution the AAMC names, then culture itself.

9A. Microsociology vs Macrosociology · 9A. Functionalism · 9A. Manifest and Latent Functions · 9A. Conflict Theory · +25 more

Age, gender, race, immigration and orientation as the variables that structure a society, and the curves, flows and movements that change it.

9B. Age: Aging and the Life Course · 9B. Age Cohorts and the Social Significance of Aging · 9B. Sex vs Gender · 9B. The Social Construction of Gender · +19 more

Stratification drawn as space, as class, and as a health gradient: segregation maps, mobility ladders with honest rung spacing, and outcomes plotted by income.

10A. Residential Segregation · 10A. Neighborhood Safety and Violence · 10A. Environmental Justice · 10A. Social Class and Socioeconomic Status · +14 more

The only MCAT section with no science in it: 53 questions, 9 passages, 90 minutes, and everything you need already sitting in the text.

The CARS Blueprint: 53 Questions, 9 Passages, 90 Minutes · Everything You Need Is in the Passage · The 50/50 Humanities and Social Sciences Split · Tone and Word Choice Across the Two Passage Types · +1 more

Foundations of Comprehension, Reasoning Within the Text and Reasoning Beyond the Text - 30, 30 and 40 percent, and what each really asks.

Foundations of Comprehension (30%) · Literal Meaning of a Word or Phrase in Context · The Author's Thesis, Main Point and Theme · The Purpose of For Example, Therefore and Consequently · +11 more

How to read 550 words of dense argument in six minutes, keep the author's voice separate from everyone else's, and not run out of clock.

Reading a Dense Humanities Passage in Six Minutes · The Voice Inventory: Author vs Reported Views · The Pivot Where the Author's Own Position Arrives · Why Prior Knowledge Is a Liability Here · +3 more

The same four skills are weighted identically on all three science sections, and reasoning outweighs knowledge on every one of them.

The Four Skills and Their 35/45/10/10 Weights · Skill 1: Knowledge of Scientific Concepts and Principles · Written, Symbolic and Graphic Forms of One Concept · Observations That Illustrate a Principle · +6 more

Research design and statistics are only 20 percent of a science section, and they are the 20 percent that needs no memorising at all.

Skill 3: Reasoning About Research Design and Execution · Independent and Dependent Variables · Controls: The One Variable Held Still · Samples, Populations and Generalization · +11 more

230 questions over 6 hours 15 of content and about 7 hours 30 seated, scored 472 to 528 on a scale that is equated rather than curved.

The Four Sections, Their Order, Counts and Timing · Passage Sets vs Discrete Questions · 230 Questions, 6h15 of Content, 7h30 Seated · The Breaks: 10, 30, 10 and Time That Does Not Carry · +5 more

Every number on the MCAT is worked by hand: log scales, slopes, significant digits, dimensional analysis, basic trig and vectors, no calculus.

No Calculator: Every Number Is Estimated · Linear, Semilog and Log-Log Scales · Calculating Slopes from Figures and Tables · Significant Digits and Reasonable Estimates · +6 more