[Helen Finkelstein]

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I am studying from scratch, following Ari’s life-saving study planner, for which I am truly grateful, and reading his IMAT course (early access), creating my own Anki, as Ari recommended (created over a thousand so far). I often find myself trying to decide how much I should aim to memorise when studying more involved topics, like reabsorbtion from filtrate, for example. Am I trying to learn too much or not enough? Learning more than IMAT requires will come at a cost of not being able to cover all the topics, so I am having to make my own judgement as to how detailed my knowledge should be. I do realise that for many reasons my judgement is not the best. Ideally, I would like to have a more detailed syllabus, telling me exactly what I need to know. I tried googling it but couldn’t find it. Another option would be to take lots of IMAT tests and derive from them the depth/breadth of knowledge required. However, I can’t do that because I haven’t covered all the topics yet, so, it’s like chicken and egg: in order to know what to learn I need to analyse the test questions, but to do the tests I need to learn. A more detailed syllabus is preferable by far for obvious reasons. In its absence, any advice will be gratefully received.

Discussion

[Ari Horesh]

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I agree that figuring out the extent to which you need to learn things for the exam can be challenging. The syllabus itself is extensive and not specific, and we need to guess most of it based on different past papers.

I will add many small tips and hints along the course soon, explaining which parts you should emphasize more and which parts are less important.

I am aware of this problem, and I will add the appropriate notes to the course.

[Helen Finkelstein]

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Thanks very much for your reply, Ari.

As well as adding your tips into the course, perhaps it would be beneficial to put them in their own document to serve as a convenient reference when using Pearson as the primary study material? However, I understand that this may require quite a bit of work. Therefore, perhaps in the short term it would be possible to publish some guidance on notably relevant or irrelevant concepts that occur throughout the course. As a contrived example, maybe ‘Homeostasis’ should be given particular attention whenever it occurs, but ‘Evolution’ can be ignored.

Thanks again for all the resources and guidance you’ve made available to us; I can’t imagine preparing for IMAT without it.