Kaplan PCAT 2010-2011 Edition

Comment: It was a good deal, but it was delivered late.

In sum, I am satisfied.

Comment: I graduated from college in 1998 and have always wanted to go to pharmacy school. After investigating what the requirements would be, I decided to purchase this book as a guideline for the exam. Even though I've been out of college for over 10 years, my background is in microbiology/chemistry so I had plenty of reference books already for these subjects. After looking through this book, the organic chemistry section is indeed lacking, but the general chemistry section is a very good review in my opinion. There are a multitude of typos and errors in the math section though that do make answering some of the questions difficult. I would definitely suggest reviewing your algebra, statistics, and first/second semester calculus courses. Even though I have a strong background in microbiology(bacteriology), I do not have much knowledge of "general" biology. I used this book as my only source for the biology section of this exam and found it to be adequate. The biology section was my lowest score but it was still competitive. I found the reading and verbal analogy sections very good practice which paid off for me as these sections were my highest scores. I would definitely suggest increasing your vocabulary to score well on these sections! There are many other guides available on Amazon to help with this. One other thing, it would definitely be worth it to brush up on your writing skills. It's been a number of years since I've had to write an essay let alone two! Time management is essential so make sure you keep this in mind. Anyways, this book was extremely useful in my case. On my first try taking the exam, I achieved a very competitive score, and I can honestly say, that would not have been possible without my having this book as a guide!

Comment: Item arrived just as described. Couldn't get through all of it before the test, but I'm sure it helped. Purchase went smoothly.

Comment: I used this text extensively as test preparation. It's a decent review book but if I were to do it over I would use another resource as a significant supplement to this.

As others have stated, the sections on writing, verbal, and reading comprehension are so short that they may as well have been omitted. Then again, I don't know what could have been included to realistically help for these sections, so I was satisfied with the content.

Biology and chemistry have extensive review sections, but I don't get the feeling that the amount of effort I spent to review the material in this book was really helpful compared to the subject matter variety on the actual exam. For example, the organic chemistry review was laughable to the point of being misleading about the content of the actual exam. Chemistry could really help more if it helped zero in on these are the elemental data, formulas, etc. you really need to memorize, etc. With the amount of biology material presented, I was surprised how many questions on the actual exam were not covered at all in the review (thinking of entire subjects not touched on - I am obviously not expecting the review materials to cover every possible question.)

Quant review was decent, though more practice problems for the calculus and more difficult problems could easily substitute for the simple problems included. Just having more MC problems would be nice. Many of the concepts had only 1 or 2 practice questions - not enough IMO. More practice would be better!

With respect to format, one somewhat frustrating aspect of the text is that many of the "review" problems are short answer format instead of multiple choice. Thus, though it reviews the material, it doesn't do so in a PCAT-specific manner (i.e. helping get used to the way questions are presented.)

This book is also missing any relevant test taking tips. Maybe this is because Kaplan really doesn't have a good handle on what Pearson (the PCAT administrator) is doing - I don't know. It would have been helpful, for example, to comment on the unlikelihood of realistically completing the quant section and how to identify good problems to cherry-pick to maximize score. Or, state whether you will get a periodic table (yes, you can find out this info elsewhere, but this seems to be content appropriate for a review book.) It just isn't really helpful in suggesting how to approach the exam.

Reading this again, I was probably too hard on this book. In summary, it's a decent resource, but I would be interested in supplementing with other materials if I were to take it again. Hope this helps someone.

Comment: I just got my PCAT scores back and this book was close to the only thing I used to study. The chemistry and biology sections are very good reviews. Yes there are many typos, but they are usually obvious enough that they will not mislead you. However, the organic chemistry section only addresses a few functional groups. The math section does not have enough calculus, so I took a practice test and reviewed the concepts that appeared on that exam. The verbal section and reading comprehension section are too short to actually help the reader. Lastly, the writing section is basically two pages. In closing, this book is a good review of inorganic chemistry and general biology (I was in the 99th percentile for both the chem and bio sections), but I would get an additional aid for the writing, verbal and reading comprehension sections... and look over your old organic and calculus notes. The organic chemistry on the exam is a breeze if you are a chem major so I wouldn't worry too much about it.