Product Description

This is a 5 volume set of the newest editions of the now famous ExamKrackers MCAT Manuals. You'll find everything that you need to know to score your best on the MCAT. For the first time, these books are sold as a five volume set with a top quality, full length practice MCAT included as a bonus. 980 pages of color and black and white illustrations on text book quality paper. 31 thirty minute topical exams in MCAT format. Over 1400 MCAT questions in all. This 5 volume set is certain to become the top selling MCAT study set this year.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1765 in Books
• Published on: 2007-03
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 1088 pages

Review
Holy COW, May 25, 2003
Reviewer: Brian Weisel from Ann Arbor, MI USA This gives you exactly what you need, and nothing else. It is a great condensed format that if read in full will prpare you for anything on the MCAT. I wish I had these book when I took orgo or physics, it would've helped me in those courses.
-- Review

About the Author
Jonathan Orsay is uniquely qualified to write an MCAT preparation book. He graduated on the Dean's list with a B.A. in History from Columbia University. While considering medical school, he sat for the real MCAT three times from 1989 to 1996. He scored in the 90 percentiles on all sections before becoming an MCAT instructor. He has lectured in MCAT test preparation for thousands of hours and across the country for every MCAT administration since August 1994. He has taught premeds from such prestigious Universities as Harvard and Columbia. He was the editor of one of the best selling MCAT prep books in 1996 and again in 1997. Orsay is currently the Director of MCAT for Examkrackers. He has written and published the following books and audio products in MCAT preparation: "Examkrackers MCAT Physics"; "Examkrackers MCAT Chemistry"; "Examkrackers MCAT Organic Chemistry"; "Examkrackers MCAT Biology"; "Examkrackers MCAT Verbal Reasoning & Math"; "Examkrackers 1001 questions in MCAT Physics", "Examkrackers MCAT Audio Osmosis with Jordan and Jon".

Customer Reviews

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.

Great Review Platform
I bought this 5 volume set and the Audio Osmosis CDs and spent 3 weeks pouring over them in preparation for the August 2002 MCAT. Additionally, I purchased the 1001 question series for the subjects in which I was feeling weak. I was barely able to get to any of the 1001 question books in that time.

10 years after originally taking the courses covered on the exam, I managed to score in the 80-90 percentiles. Considering how many new graduates I was testing against, I am happy with that result. I thank the Examkrackers series for my good score.

The books and CD lectures cover all of the subjects on the MCAT and allow you to realize your weak spots.

I made a set of flash cards from the CD lectures and books on points of information that I was rusty on. I then memorized those flash cards. I understand Jon and Jordan are coming out with a set of flash cards so that may save you a step.

As a bonus to buying their books, you can access their website at examkrackers com and chat with Jon and Jordan themselves. They will personally answer any questions you have. Also, they have a medical career counselor who will answer your career based questions. From their website, I see that they offer in-class preparation courses on the East Coast. That may be a good option for people living in that area.

Hands down this is the best series for MCAT preparation.

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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EDIT:
So all in all, I would say this. If you are really conceptually strong and did amazing in the classes then ExamKrackers is ok because the quick summary fashion in which they present information will be great. If you haven't taken a class in a few years and are a non traditional student, these may not be for you. The other option is using the Examkrackers as a good base and when you don't understand the quick overviews to use a textbook or some other more comprehensive source that explains concepts better.

I think this is why you can see some people really enjoying this and some people who don't think it is that great. A person who HAS a concept down can read this and say, "oh yeah I remember this, I need to know this? ok" while someone else can read it who has the concept down and say, "wow, if I hadn't learned this really well I would have no clue what this is saying. This is horrible."

You see, 2 people with the same strength reacting to the same resource differently. And of course those who don't have a concept down will have a vague understanding based mostly on memory but their ability to think critically in new directions (which is what the MCAT truly tests, not memory) will be tough. They may be able to get a 10 but I think a lot of us studying are setting goals higher than a 10 in each section.

EXAMPLE OF WHAT I'M SAYING: The section on the electron transport chain is 1 long paragraph. When I read it I had NO idea what it was talking about other than all the definitions of all the major constituents involved. If asked a difficult question on proton gradients or what would happen if you inhibited ATP synthase I would have been clueless and unable to get it right. If asked a simple Q I may have been ok.

So, what I did was also buy the TPR hyperlearning books and I read the EK (with a lot of questions and confusion, filling in gaps with wikipedia sometimes) then I read the TPR section on the same topic (2-3 pages instead of 1 paragraph), now I am conceptually stronger, then I will create a small review back with the EK material.

So I am using the EK as my backbone, because it helps me make the review BUT with only the EK I wouldn't be able to excel (as I took bio years ago). Had I just finished bio and had an excellent prof that covered everything, then I may have been conceptually strong with something like the electron transport chain and the EK short paragraph (as opposed to 2-3 pages in the princeton book) would have been sufficient.

Not ALL the EK sections are this much shorter than the TPR sections BUT you will find more effort to make sure you know everything that is going on and why in a TPR book while EK's goal is cleary: HERE IS WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW in the shortest way we can do it. (useful if you already conceptually strong).

GOOD Luck peoples!