So I finally took a practice segment for Biology. I didn't do great, but I did ok. Or I would have apart from one set of 7 questions that I bombed. Had I gotten those though, I'd be happy (enough) to move on. So what I'll do now is review DNA/RNA again (since those 7 questions came from that area) today and tomorrow. The other few questions I got wrong were, for the most part, things I either should have got right or could have with a bit more review. But the review neccesary to cover every complete set of possible questions like that is time consuming enough it could go on for months, which doesn't work. Getting 2 or 3 more questions right by spending another month on Biology doesn't make sense when I can spend that month on Chemistry and get an extra 10 right (or however many). At any rate I'll start working on Chemistry on the 13th now, almost on schedule, and will keep looking over my Biology notes periodically.
The biggest thing I got out of this though was that it's not a science test. At all. I know I posted that earlier from reading it and being told that, but since I hadn't taken any practice segments I didn't really know what the test was like.
Of ~40 questions maybe only 8 or 10 required "know this" knowledge. The rest was largely stuff you could get from passages if you had an idea what was being talked about. So most of the questions I got wrong (apart from that section on DNA) ended up being things I could probably get right just by taking a hundred practice tests - a lot like the LSAT. A lot of the stuff I spent the last few months looking at was talked about (Lutenizing Hormones and Follicle Stimulating Hormones, for example), but it was looked at in the context of a passage and not as a "LH is created in the a) anterior pituitary, b) thymus, c) pineal gland, or d) hypothalamus". You didn't (really) have to know what LH did either, you just had to have a hang of the basic concept.
This steers me a lot towards buying Kaplans online program. Or at least looking at it closely in the next few days. It also steers me in the direction of rushing through my traditional studying in favor of spamming practice exams once I've got a very rough hang of the basics.
I'll try doing Chemistry fast in ~2 weeks, and we'll see how that goes. If it works just as well as having spent ~2 months on Biology I'll be very happy, because time's a commodity here.
