New MCAT Prep Course Tailored for YC Students
Jacob Stone

Junior year of college can be an extremely stressful time for many undergraduates. Not only must students manage their regular class workloads, many dedicate countless hours to study for admittance exams to medical, law and graduate school. Students start to take these exams their junior year in order to apply senior year for admittance September following graduation. In order to do well on these exams many students turn to professionals for guidance in the test-prep process. One such organization that provides coaching for these tests, and others, is Test Prep New York (TPNY). This semester, TPNY is teaching an MCAT course here at YU, designed specifically around and for Yeshiva pre-med students.

TPNY was founded a number of years ago by Bara Sapir, a Jewish woman who has worked as a tutor for standardized tests for over fifteen years, including for the Princeton Review. She believes TPNY provides the most comprehensive and effective approach for test taking success. She claims that with Princeton Review she witnessed students take months to prepare for a single exam, and still not do as well as expected. It became clear to her that knowledge of the test material was not the sole ingredient for test taking success. Rather she believes that if students suffer from test anxiety or low self confidence, in spite of their rigorous preparation, they will not score as high as what they are otherwise capable of achieving. To address this problem, Sapir created a unique approach to help mentally prepare students for exams, including enhancing focus, mental retention and confidence.

Sapir likes to compare taking a test to playing a game of basketball. She says that not only does the test taker/ball player need the physical knowledge/skills to perform well, but rather he must also feel that he is mentally prepared and "in the zone." She explains that one needs to combine the inner and outer games of the test, the former being who someone is when he takes the exam and the latter being the test itself. She emphasizes that being in the right state of mind during the test can have dramatic results, and that her methodology "ensures that one can be the best test taker he can be." Sapir explains that TPNY is the only test preparation company to fuse understanding content with preparing mentally. This combined with outstanding tutors (all are highly trained specialists, and many have PhDs) makes TPNY the best test prep program around.

The ten week course being taught at YU by Dr. Karen van Hoek meets every Sunday, and will have students prepared for the May exam date. Van Hoek has a PhD in linguistics, and has been a tutor for standardized tests for the past eight years. She says that her ultimate goal for the class "is to raise the score on the Verbal Reasoning section [of the MCAT]."

Van Hoek commented that it was interesting that the verbal section of the MCAT is called "Verbal Reasoning" rather than reading comprehension -- a section found on most other standardized exams. She believes that the MCAT's Verbal Reasoning is a lot harder than the verbal section of other tests because the passages are extremely dense, and they focus on unusual topics. The questions asked usually require students to analyze the content and then make inferences and educated predictions about what the author might state on an unrelated issue, rather than simply spit back answers. As she said, the passages are often about "art, literature, history and dance… [and] students need to get used to reading and analyzing tricky things in areas that they are not interested in at all."

Van Hoek believes that the course will be successful for two main reasons. Firstly, she said that most other test prep courses do not focus on the Verbal Reasoning section of the exam,
even though it accounts for one third of the students' overall score. Secondly, similar to what Sapir mentioned, van Hoek said that the program is tailored to the individual students. The bigger companies often create one template of material, and distribute it nationwide. TPNY specializes in working with individuals and small groups, and is therefore able to provide "more tailored materials."

As the exam date looms closer, it will be interesting to see how calm the students in the course will be, and if this leads to higher scores. With the YU students armed with a comprehensive skill set and an enhanced mindset, Sapir is confident that all will go well and hopes to create more programs designed for YU students.

For more information about TPNY and their test preparation programs and techniques, please visit their website, testprepny.com.