While there are tons of factors that play a role into how long you should be taking to studying for the MCAT, the general rule of thumb is that if you’re studying full-time, you’ll want to aim for around 3 months, and if you’re studying part-time, you’ll want to aim for around 6 months. That sounds like a lot, because it is! For the vast majority of pre-meds, this is by far the hardest exam you will have taken in your life and there isn’t really anything comparable, which is why it requires such a large time commitment.

With all of that being said, every single person will be different. Some people take more time when they study, some people can study super quickly. You don’t know which one you’ll be until you start. Those general time tables are simply a very broad estimate based on how much time you have and still widely differ based on where you’re starting and how efficiently you can work. For example, someone who is studying full-time but hasn’t taken the undergraduate courses in 10 years will probably take longer than someone who is in the middle of their pre-reqs in college right now.

The MCAT is offered yearly between January and mid-September (don’t get me started on my frustrations that they aren’t offered in the fall). You can find the 2025 exam dates and timelines here.

There are two things to consider when trying to figure out when you should be taking the MCAT.

When are you planning to apply to medical school? In order to ensure that your application is getting to the medical schools as soon as possible, you’ll want to have taken your MCAT by early June at the latest. Ideally, however, you’re taking it earlier than that, but there is still a way to send off your primary applications without having an MCAT score, but still not having it delay your application. Again, you want to take your MCAT ideally sometime before the early spring of the year you plan to submit your applications at the latest, that way you still have some time to adjust to your score if needed before applications are sent out. Just keep in mind that the earlier in the year the testing date is, the harder it is to get a seat (don’t get me started on limited exam availability either).

Are you in school? If so, you probably want to plan to take your MCAT right around the time you’ll be finishing up your pre-reqs, often being your Junior year. If you can possibly take it in the summer-time, that is ideal as you probably have more time devoted to studying than during your academic seasons, but obviously that will be dramatically different from person to person. Just keep in mind that some (but not all) schools will only accept your score for 3 years after you’ve taken it, which is another reason as to why it’s better to take it towards the end of college rather than your freshman year, for example. You don’t want to take it too early, end up going to grad school/taking a year or two off, and then let a good score expire (which is exactly what happened to me the first time I took it).

Long Story Short: You ideally want to take it by March/April of the year you are applying to medical schools, or the year before (at any point in the year) as well. This will avoid the higher risk of taking it too early that it may expire while also still giving you enough buffer time in between your score release date and application send-off date that you could take it again if you really need it.

This sounds like an obvious thing to say, but a lot (but not all!) of professors end up testing information in a way that requires you only to know what something is, not why it is that way. The MCAT will do the latter. For example, your Biochem class may have a test question that says, “What happens to oxidative phosphorylation when the ETC is shut down?” and the answer would be that it also stops. That may be enough for your Biochem class, but it’s going to be super beneficial to your understanding of the content on the MCAT if you can learn why that happens in the first place in your undergraduate courses. A lot of pre-med students end up entirely relearning most of the content for the MCAT either because they didn’t learn it well enough in their classes or it’s been long enough that they’ve forgotten, so if you’re taking classes while studying for the MCAT, use that to your advantage!

Don’t get me wrong, the idea that you may have heard that the MCAT is “a mile wide but an inch deep” in reference to how it will cover a whole range of topics but won’t go as deep as your undergraduate courses did is for the most part true, I’m simply saying that if you can truly try to understand why each concept is the way it is whenever you’re learning them in your classes, you’ll probably save yourself some time when you’re reviewing and learning content for the actual MCAT. Should also help with your classes themselves as well!

Great question! I’ve listed all of those out under my Resources Tab (under “Other Resources”), so you can find my specific recommendations there as far as what I liked, what my students have liked, what I wished I would have or would not have paid for, etc.

In general, my main advice is that you should try out several different sources of materials before you settle on one. Some people really like certain YouTube channels, other people really like others, so my big recommendation is to (at first) try them both to see if one is more intuitive with how your brain works. The same goes for the many amazing anki decks that are out there. They all have their own advantages in some ways but some decks will work better for others.

I’m a scheduler. I loved keeping a schedule, and I had listed out every single thing I was going to do for that week by minute as far as my MCAT studying was concerned. That was the way I kept organized during my undergrad, and it’s what I initially tried to do for the MCAT.

However, because the MCAT is such a long term exam that is going to have lots of ups and downs, I found that my super detailed schedule would quickly fall apart and then I would have to constantly be redoing my schedule. Additionally, the things that I wouldn’t get done felt like they kept piling up and started adding on to my already significant anxiety about the exam. If you love keeping a detailed schedule, obviously do whatever you’re comfortable with, just know that you may need to adjust your ways for this exam specifically if you’re noticing that same thing.

I recommend separating your goals into 3 different terms/lengths to try to help keep you on schedule as much as possible without giving you too much added anxiety from constantly redoing your schedule: daily, weekly, and long-term.

Long-term goals: These should probably be the first goals that you identify. Most people separate their studying into two different giant blocks, the “content review” phase where you are simply relearning and memorizing the content for the MCAT, and the practicing phase, where you complete most of your practice problems and full-length exams. Identifying the rough date that you want to be finishing your content-review phase will help you be able to keep track of long-term whether or not you’re behind or ahead. If you’re studying full time, I recommend trying to finish up your content phase and mostly focusing on practice around a month and a half before your exam. If you’re studying part time, that number may be somewhere around 2+ months. As soon as you start studying and are getting a good feel of how long your content review phase will take, I recommend trying to set a date to be finished with it.

Weekly goals: For example, during your content phase, you may have a weekly goal that you want to finish your review of OChem in that week, Physics the next week (or two), so on and so forth. Maybe it’s to finish 3 subsections of Biology and General Chemistry in a week. By giving yourself deadlines that span over a week, you’ll be able to adjust your studying schedule throughout the week to accommodate for gained or lost time to make sure that you’re on track. These are (in my opinion) the most important goals in your ability to actually be on-time for when your exam date is.

Daily goals: These are goals that I think should be more oriented to just organizing what topics you should be studying/practicing, rather than a list of specific numbers of questions or chapters you want to review. For example, maybe you have a goal that on monday, you study Carb Metabolism, Thermodynamics, and just do some practice for both (if you’re deciding to do multiple subjects in a week), followed by some CARS practice. As you start studying you’ll get pretty good at gauging how long each topic will take you to study, so rather than giving yourself a number of things to do, just give yourself a broad box to check. It’ll make it easier to move things around, and having a more concise list of things to do will hopefully help prevent any mounting anxiety from falling behind. As an aside (that I have mentioned elsewhere), I recommend trying to do CARS every day. Can just be one or two passages most days, but CARS requires endurance and consistency to see improvement, so don’t put it off or forget about it!

Most importantly, like all good advice for the MCAT, you know you best, and you should organize your studying in a way that promotes success for you. My plan really worked well for me, as it has for others, but it may not work for you. Your ability to quickly adapt will make studying for this exam a lot easier.

Two big things: Burn out, and scoring plateaus.

Burn out is really common in the medical field in general, and is one of the most common hindrances I ever saw in my students studying for the MCAT. A lot of people like to analogize the exam to running a marathon, where you want to be consistent with your training, but you want to give yourself some rest as to avoid injuries or losing all momentum and energy. You most likely haven’t studied for an exam that requires the amount of concentration and mental stamina that the MCAT requires, which is why it’s something you have to train.

The best way I’ve found to avoid burning out is to schedule yourself a weekly off-day, for example, not studying on any Friday. While you may feel like you’re losing studying time, you’re (hopefully) giving yourself enough of a mental break that you’re not driving yourself crazy, but it may also be enough of a mental reset that your studying on other days is more efficient. There’s a give and take, and I personally believe that giving yourself a day off has the long term benefit of ensuring that you stay mentally sane during the studying process, which was super important to me.

Scoring plateaus are also very common, as are outright score decreases as well. The latter I have found are mainly due to things such as burn out or simply bad logistical practicing habits (for example taking full length exams too often or without taking any rest before them), but the former can be more elusive in diagnosing and fixing. Whenever your score plateaus, it’s very hard to figure out why you aren’t improving and what you should be doing to fix it.

While each individual’s reason for plateauing is different, my main advice is in order to attempt to get out of the funk, try something new. Try a new CARS strategy, try studying at different times of days, try changing what day your off day is, try changing your time allocation to passages vs free standing questions, etc. With more information someone like a tutor or on reddit will be able to give better and more specific advice, but if you’re on your own, by shifting up what you’re doing you may be able to identify problem areas or new tactics that you didn’t know where as important or beneficial as they are now.

Just like working out, or a diet, it’s going to take a while for you to actually feel the rhythm of studying every single day. For a lot of people, the first few weeks of studying are the least efficient and they’re also where a lot of people give up on the MCAT as well. By simply just trying to “get in the gym” once a day, whether it’s for a long time or not, try to teach your brain that it needs to be studying for the MCAT. Your brain is going to feel like an henry teenager that doesn’t want to go to his little sister’s gymnastics meet for a big portion of your time studying for the exam, and the sooner you can get used to that feeling or basically get over it, you’ll become more efficient sooner rather than later.

You can find them here.