McGraw-Hill's MCAT, Second Edition (McGraw-Hill's MCAT (W/CD))

The McGraw-Hill MCAT guide is a piecemeal collection of formulae and problems garnered from the company's various textbooks. From the broad, shoddy organization of the book, to the frequent typos, the McGraw-Hill MCAT book succeeds only in its true mission: to squeeze money out of students while keeping production costs as low as possible.

Most importantly, much of the information presented in the typical textbook is extraneous for the MCAT. It is imperative that MCAT guides at least minimally recognize the patterns and format of the MCAT. Only in the first ten or so pages (on basic Newtonian physics) do the authors acknowledge the material that will or will not be on the MCAT. In other sections, they go into excruciating detail, providing tables and formulae that I can only surmise I shouldn't memorize because they are far too complex.

The book presents almost no analysis or recognition of the types of problems that will be on the MCAT. In fact, most of...Read more

I bought this book a few days ago, and I have to say it is complete and utter trash. The problems are completely reasonable for one to do with the help of a calculator (after all, while I could do a few clever tricks to calculate sin(40), it would be silly to attempt it on an actual MCAT exam), the authors seem to have forgotten that the MCAT does not allow the use of calculators. After reading over just the physics review section, there seems to a great deal of material that is superfluous, and the topics that are important are too short for somebody with a weak to even moderate science background to understand and really master. On top of this, there are a great deal of errors in the book that are unforgivable. The book frequently confuses the concept of moles with molarity, and it's only by chance that you might take a look at the example problem and realize their mistake. This book seems like a cut and paste of all of my freshman year textbooks rather than a targeted, concise, and...Read more

I am using this book in conjunction with the official MCAT topics list to fill out a study outline. The great part about this book is that it has excellent figures- MUCH better than the doodles given in Kaplan, Examkrackers, etc. This is because McGraw Hill uses images from its biology books that are very nicely done. I would highly recommend this book for its diagrams and low cost as a SUPPLEMENT to your MCAT preparation.