The coffee case is such a great example of corporate spin . Instead of saying woman sues for third degree burns to genitals received from mcdonalds coffee just say woman sues because she spilled her coffee and it was hot , and frame it with the idea that everyone is aggressively litigious in America even though the most litigious people in the nation are corporations , and boom . Suddenly everyone ' s on the side of big bidness <| sep |> I didn ' t . I think the only times I studied for more than 34 hours a day were the 23 days directly before the test . And even the 34 hour days were only for a week or two before that . I ' m honestly not convinced that studying more would have improved my score that much . I ' m not trying to say I ' m super smart and just didn ' t need to study . Rather , I ' m saying that I don ' t really buy into the concept of long hours of studying high score . After 6 hours of solid study , even with some decent breaks in there , you ' ll be exhausted . You just won ' t be retaining all that much . The value you get per hour of study just keeps going down . What I did , and what I recommend to people , was to study in a way that ' s based on how people learn . Spaced repetition is a big part of it instead of just reading something over and over , read it once and move onto something else . Then , just as you ' re on the edge of forgetting it , cover it again . Then cover it again later , but leave even more space in between . If it takes work to recall something to memory , you ' ll retain it better afterwards . Use flash cards and practice testsquizzes A LOT . Testing yourself on something is much better than rereading it . Endofchapter quizzes , MCATquestionoftheday sites , practice tests , all of that stuff . Don ' t think of practice tests just as a way of predicting your score that is the thing they ' re worst at and the least useful thing they can do . Think of them as a way to assess your strengths and weaknesses , but also as a way to learn . Every time you make yourself recall something for a test question or flashcard , you strengthen that memory . There ' s a book on this topic that I ' ve recommended here many times before called Make it Stick The Science of Successful Learning . I really recommend it it helped me out immensely . If you haven ' t done an Audible free trial , you can get the audiobook of it on there for free . You can download it , then immediately cancel the free trial . The MCAT is a marathon , not a sprint . I crammed for almost every test in undergrad , and did well on them . But those techniques won ' t work here . You have to study for months , which means you have to study in ways that will solidify the knowledge in the longterm . I ' m sure many people do well by studying 8 hours a day for months , but if you do that it will likely hurt your grades and other areas of your life . I ' m not saying you shouldn ' t study a lot for the test , or that it ' s easy if you just do it the right way . It is still difficult and it still takes a lot of work . But I really believe that studying 3 hours in a day intelligently will be just as if not more effective than studying 8 hours of just bruteforce churning . Of course you could do 8 hours of intelligent studying too , but you ' ll still run into diminishing returns and lose quality of life .