Last Minute Tips for the MCAT

Week before the exam Ready for your big expedition? photosource: National Geographic. Although everyone will approach the MCAT slightly differently, a bird's-eye view of studying will often show a predictable pattern. Typically, when students start studying, they get overwhelmed by the amount of material they need to cover and they don't necessarily know how to approach it. After they form a study plan - either by themselves, with a tutor, or as part of a class - they tend to become comfortable in their rhythm of targeting the material on a regular basis and methodologically completing content review and practice problems, with intermittent practice tests. In the weeks just prior to the test, however, the test looms and panic sets in as students start to question their preparation. However, this is one of the most important times in your studying -- you have to stay positive and confident but also make sure to utilize your time wisely. Although most of your preparation is behind you, there are a few things you can do last-minute to relieve your nerves and make sure you perform your best. Week before the exam Pay attention to your mindset To best get a handle on test anxiety, check out my other post about mental strategies to conquer the MCAT. In brief, your last week before the exam should focus on using your support system to stay positive and help destress, and believing in your preparation. In many professional or high level sports, athletes will take a taper period leading up to a major event. Think of your last week as a 'mental taper.' You definitely shouldn't be taking any practice exams, and should try to ease off the practice questions and really difficult content review as well. Your brain needs time to consolidate and synthesize all of the information you've taken in. After preparing for months, it’ll be unlikely that you're going to uncover something you've never seen before in the days immediately leading up to your exam. Take care of yourself physically The worst thing to happen would be to be well prepared, hitting targets on your practice exams, and then getting an awful cold two days before test day. The exam is long enough, but can be made way longer If you're coughing and sniffling the entire time without tissues. Pay special attention to getting enough sleep and eating well. No all-nighters to try and get in last minute review! 1-2 days before the exam Try to dedicate the last day or two to a 'high-yield review.' It's likely that you made review sheets of your own through your notes while you were studying. If not, many test prep books or websites offer 'cheat sheets' or reviews for each test section that are pretty short (under ten pages). In the week before the test, dedicate at least two days to reviewing these high-yield points. The AAMC also provides a ‘topic outline’ for each section -- talking yourself through each of these outline points is another way to review. Make sure you are familiar with the concepts mentioned, and if there's anything that you feel you've forgotten or are still shaky on, take a little bit of time to go back to your books and re-read that section. If you've studied well, it will be a nice way to see most of the material again and shouldn't take more than 2-3 hours per section. If you're still feeling shaky, it's still a way to re-see the information and have at least the big highlight topics in your head on test day. This review should be pretty pas sive; this means you shouldn’t be answering new questions or wracking your brain for lost information -- you should just be trying to absorb anything you haven’t already and re-establishing your knowledge base. This should make you feel more confident! If you find yourself feeling stressed about the review, make sure you’re focusing on broad, basic concepts as opposed to tiny details. During the exam If you struggle with pacing, first answer the questions you can. Generally, you shouldn't be messing with your test strategy in the middle of an exam. However, if you're still consistently not getting to every question on the exam, you want to do everything in your power to make sure you see all of the questions. To try to save some time, in the science passages, go through the individual questions and try to answer them based on your background knowledge. You'll often be able to answer more than half of them right off the bat. When you read the passage, look only for information that is pertinent to the questions you've seen. Go back and answer any passage-based questions, and then verify that the answers you previously picked make sense in context of the passage. This can shave off some time by focusing your passage reading and minimizing the amount of time you need to spend going back to the passage for each question. For more specific tips about approaches to questions and passages that can raise your score, check out this post. Otherwise, sit back and rest assured that all of your preparation is about to pay off! ; For more relevant reading, check out: MCAT Statistics Crash Course: What Do I Need to Know? (Part I)Gametoegensis on the MCATGetting an MCAT Study Buddy Looking to work with an MCAT tutor to help you get in shape? Check out our MCAT tutoring services! Cambridge Coaching offers private in-person tutoring in New York City and Boston, and online tutoring around the world.

The Evolution Of Quality At Xerox Research Assignment - 1100 Words

The Evolution Of Quality At Xerox Research Assignment (Essay Sample) Content: THE EVOLUTION OF QUALITY AT XEROXStudent name:University AffiliationThe Evolution of Quality at XeroxThe Xerox CrisisThis dates back in the earlier 1950s up to the end of 1970s, where Xerox dominated the market by being the only one in the copier industry. The products from Xerox exhibited an excellent rating since their performance was of high-quality making dominate the market. The fall of Xerox started when IBM and Kodak joined the industry in the early 1980s, which later on, the share for Xerox had to reduce by 50% regarding the market share in which the company was once the dominant player (Evans Lindsay, 2016 p.31). The enterprises that emerged to compete with Xerox had to keenly focus on quality and production of low volume copiers while Xerox remained practicing its previous business process. This made Xerox have a lot of rework, product inspection, a lot of wastage and scrap, customer product returns and many more defaulters that affected the competition.IBM and Kodak, who were the main emerging competitors of Xerox focused much on quality and production. This aspect made Xerox lag behind compared to its competitors, who majored on the larger workforce, addressed the manufacturing problems, had a larger number of suppliers unlike Xerox with complex and redundant business processes that affected it with high chances of ceasing the operations (Evans Lindsay, 2016 p.31). Therefore, Xerox had to think of the immediate action to be taken to regain its smooth operations and ensure continuity and competition while being once the leading in the copier in the industry. This was meant to prevent Xerox from closing its operations.Performance Excellence Turnaround StrategyDavid T Kearns, the president of Xerox came up with a strategy known as leadership through quality, which focused on quality issues. This strategy had to address the issues of management problems based on manufacturing defects, the tendency of the customers returning the product s, processes involved during manufacturing, the number of suppliers and others. This philosophy was formed while basing on the statement that, every employee is liable for quality management and improvement. This has to extend its responsibilities to both internal and external customers and to link the clients with the culture of Xerox (Evans Lindsay, 2016). Furthermore, Xerox had to employ the aspect of benchmarking on the best practices in and outside the company. This was followed by a dangerous of activities including both team formation and teamwork. Their experts worked tirelessly on total quality management policy which was meant to improve the performance of the organization for the realization of its success to be continued (Charantimath, 2012).After Xerox had encountered some problems in their business, the focus shifted on feedback process. They also got involved in mail surveys and internal customer through training and program development of the employees on the busine ss and the business processes incurred (Evans, Lindsay, 2016). Xerox took an approach of reviewing, reorienting and implementation of the newly adopted processes which are aimed at formulating and implementation of the set goals and objectives for various business units. It also had to work smart on the increment of customer focus, product, job planning, and distribution through going to market network. Product delivery to the market was also a major concern for the company since this issue affected both the company and the customers.In the end, Xerox worked hard and managed to review and improve the supplier relationship. The process was so immense since the focus was too much on just in time production as well as solving the issue of employee relations, rewards and enacting recognition programs. This relation was to focus much on the gap between the management and the staff. According to Evans and Lindsay (2016), the initiatives taken by Xerox to curb the situation of rejection h ad drastically reduced the rejection rate of the default parts from 10,000 to 300 parts per million during the production time in the assembly line. This initiative also eliminated the need for inspecting suppliers parts and cost reduction by 45%. The overall manufacturing costs also reduced by 20%, the number of vendors reduced from 5000 to 500, and there was improved product quality to 93% (Evans Lindsay, 2016).In the late 1990s and early 2000s after the revitalization on the implementation of leadership by quality, Xerox adopted and started using the system of six sigma quality improvement strategy which was a drive of performance...