How to study for MCAT
MCAT covers biology, chemistry, physics, psychology and critical reasoning. Most of the advice you will read is about how many hours to put in. This is about which parts of it belong on flashcards, which do not, and how ten minutes a day beats a weekend of re-reading.
Last updated: 24 September 2026
Three things worth knowing first
- Roughly a quarter of the exam is psychology and sociology, which is mostly terminology — the part flashcards suit best.
- Content review without spaced recall is the classic failure: people re-read for months and remember for days.
- Amino acids, hormones and enzymes are pure memorisation and belong on cards from day one.
What belongs on a card
amino acid structures, hormone sources and targets, psychology terms, and the equations you are expected to know cold. The test is simple: if the answer is a fact you either know or you do not, it is a card. If the answer is a method you have to work through, it is a practice question instead, and no flashcard app will save you from doing those.
The ten-minute routine
Paste the notes from whatever you studied that day — a chapter, a practice set you got wrong, a list of terms — and let them become cards. The next day you are shown only the cards that are fading, which is usually far fewer than you expect. Know a card and it comes back in a day, then three, then a week, then longer. Miss one and it comes back tomorrow. That schedule is the whole method, and the reason ten minutes works where an hour of re-reading does not.
What this does not replace
Full-length timed practice. For MCAT especially, the thing that breaks people is pacing, and pacing is only learned under the clock. Cards keep the facts in place so your practice time goes on technique rather than remembering what a word means.
Start from your own material
Cards written from your own notes and your own wrong answers beat a downloaded set, because they are about your gaps rather than someone else's. Paste them in and you have a deck in seconds; upload the slides as a PDF if that is faster.
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Subject decks, free to read
APUSH Unit 1 · APUSH Unit 2 · AP Biology Unit 1 · AP Biology Unit 2 · AP Biology Unit 3 · AP Psychology Unit 1 · AP Psychology Unit 2 · Anatomy and Physiology Chapter 1 · all units