ExamKrackers: Complete MCAT Study Package (5 vol. set) Reviews
October 21, 2010 by Actaphysica
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Ignore people who say they used their textbooks to study…,
MY STORY:
Lets start with my score on the first MCAT I took… 13. (8V, 3PS, 2BS) My score on the MCAT of Aug/03 was 35. (12V, 12PS, 11BS) I am not that smart but at the moment I am at Georgetown School of Medicine with a scholarship and I owe it completely to Examkrackers. I never took a prep course and I also only took 32 hours of science courses ever. I was a finance major.
HOW I PREPARED:
I studied at a bookstore for the MCAT and in addition to having my textbooks, every widely available MCAT resource, and every esoteric text I could buy on Amazon, I bought all the examkrackers stuff. I also bought the past exams available from AAMC. After the first month, I realized using anything but Examkrackers stuff and the AAMC stuff was detrimental to my progress. I spent around 450 HOURS STUDYING and taking practice exams. My practice exams came from Gold Standard, Kaplan, Examkrackers, and the actual past exams from AAMC. You should take a practice exam every week but only trust your scores from the examkrackers and the aamc’s. The rest are just practice.
MY ADVICE:
TEXTBOOKS?!? If someone tells me they used their textbooks to study, I wonder if they have even been to the AAMC website. Look at the content description for the MCAT!
Examkrackers is the only company that covers the stuff on the MCAT with great detail and ignores everything else. They also keep it interesting with illustrations, jokes, etc. Want proof? Why hasn’t Kaplan changed their books or the content of their prep course (that course is a joke) after the AAMC changed the content of the MCAT? Examkrackers is interesting and it provides you with a plethora of questions to practice.
If I had it to do over again, I would buy the past exams from AAMC (a must, you are cheating yourself if you don’t) and everything possible from Examkrackers (the CD’s are a must too). After doing that I would look myself in a room with them for around 400-500 hours and then sit the exam. This is a guranteed recipe for success.
MY WARNING:
You may be successful doing other things or spending less time studying but let me warn you that nothing is more time consuming or expensive then spending an extra year in college or doing some lame research because you couldn’t get into med school on the first try. Dish out the money on these prep materials, put in the time and you will be in med school in august.
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I compiled the data from all the 5 star reviews, an honest look.,
EDIT: I want to preface this review saying that Examkrackers is a good resource and may be great for some and not for others. I don’t want to give the idea that it is a bad resource.
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Advantages:
- the materials look great (color)
- it seems to cover all the material necessary
- great marketing
Disadvantages:
- The concepts are very weak, especially in biology. You need to understand WHAT is going on conceptually. You can’t just be thrown facts and material without knowing WHAT is going on. I quote another reviewer, “I have to say, the science is very conceptually weak… they teach you shortcuts, but if you don’t grasp the concepts, the mcats is about tricking you on the weaknesses and you’ll go for all the tricks.”
- Not all of the books are excellent, the physics book is particularly weak.
- SIDE NOTE: Exam Krackers 101 Verbal passages is actually very strong and a quality resource.
I went through nearly all the reviews for this site for 30-40 minutes after I found the series to be less than 5 STAR quality (closer to 3) as so many reviewers were saying. I also noticed that a lot of the 5 star ratings were quick little “this is great, blah blah” short reviews. Please read some of the 3 star honest well written reviews. I did this. I also noticed over half of the 5 star reviews were following a certain pattern. The other thing that raised a flag was that this series had 96 reviews! 96! I tried to find ONE other MCAT comprehensive review that was close. Not one. The Kaplan 2007-2008 had 15 reviews, that was the closest.
So I asked a simple question, “how can I be sure these reviews are real or not?”. One possible answer was, reviewers like to review. So if these were REAL reviews then I would assume there may be at least ONE other review by that reviewer. JUST ONE. So I decided to waste an enormous amount of time (I have a nice quad-core HP computer less than a month old, so it helped me go faster) and open every reviewer to see if they had reviewed any other books, I felt compelled to do this if there was any foul play going on. Here is what I found:
Here are the results as of June 4th, 2009:
There were 58 reviews that gave 5 stars:
—37 of these reviews only reviewed this book (2 anonymous “by Customer”). That is over 63%
—Another 2 were fishy in that they only reviewed this book and another Examkrackers book OR this book and gave a Kaplan book a low score saying in the first sentence, “I would use the Examkrackers books”. In the first sentence made it tough to swallow. Also they were referring to some site called secret-route-dot-com which I looked up on amazon and google and found to be a scam type book with glowing reviews and then people calling it a scam.
All in all I estimate that 67% of the reviews were SINGLE reviews for this book (with only 2 that were this book and another EK book). 2 of every 3!
—33% of the reviewers that gave this book 5 Stars had reviewed some other book by some other publisher. Which looked real.
Crosscheck me on this, it is verifiable and true. Also because the reviews were fake it is likely that Examkrackers will not be able to remedy this situation because when you create a fake email to write a fake review you can’t log in again because you will forget the log in/email.
To be fair I went to check out the Kaplan Premier Program with the highest number of reviews. The 2007-2008 had 15 reviews, I was only interested in the 5 star reviews as on this book (as if someone is to falsify reviews that would likely be 5 or 1 star reviews). There were FIVE 5 star reviews, and of the 5 all 5 had reviewed at least one other book or product from amazon.com.
–100% of the people who highly reviewed the Kaplan product were REPEAT reviewers and had reviewed some other book.
I am not advocating Kaplan’s book as I haven’t used it yet. I am very worried about the fidelity of some of these 5 star reviews. I would estimate that most of them are fake.
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———I have spaced this out as a poster didn’t think I was being fair to examkrackers (objectively I do give them a 3)——–
Overall I would give the EK books a 3, but I had to give them a 2 because of the high probability of dishonesty.
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I almost gave them a 1 because I am strongly against cheating and my gut tells me that employees created a lot of those reviews.
No one can be 100% sure, but after reading over the ones that seem fake, I see an eerie resemblance and repetition…
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