u/PianistInMedicine

Just in case anyone who is also testing this saturday is still unaware of it too.

Vitamin B5, aka pantothenic acid, is the precursor to coenzyme A.

Vitamin B6, aka pyridoxine, is a precursor to/cofactor for PLP (pyridoxal phosphate).

Vitamin C is also called ascorbic acid.

Know the structure of ubiquinone, aka Coenzyme Q.

Know the structure of flavin.

Isoleucine and threonine have chiral beta carbons.

Circular dichroism exploits the chirality of amino acid a-carbons.

The three stop codons have actual names: UAA = Ochre, UAG = Amber, UGA = Opal.

Know how many hydrogen bond donors and acceptors each nucleobase has.

Lysine can form a Schiff base.

I swear, when I review the answers I get wrong in qpacks and SBs and FLs, the right answer always seems so self-evident after the fact. It even appears EASY once you know what the answer is and how the AAMC arrived at it. So knowing content is clearly important but knowing how to think a certain way is half the battle. Allow me to give you two questions I got wrong as an example:

Which of the following phase changes is used to determine the heat of fusion for a pure substance?

a. Melting of a solid

b. Sublimation of a solid

c. Boiling of a liquid

d. Condensation of a gas

Correct answer: a. Melting of a solid

OBVIOUSLY! The definition of fusion is melting. That's all the question was getting at. But I got it wrong because I literally started calculating hypothetical phase changes for hypothetical experiments in my mind.

Another example:

Which terms best define tRNA?

A. Molecule consisting of a double RNA strand of approximately 1000 nucleotides

B. Molecule consisting of a single RNA strand of approximately 1000 nucleotides

C. Molecule carrying the attachment site for an amino acid at its 3' end

D. Molecule carrying the attachment site for the ribosome at its 5' end

Correct answer: C. Molecule carrying the attachment site for an amino acid at its 3' end

I had picked B because I knew that tRNA is a single stranded RNA molecule whose job is to bring amino acids to the ribosome. I saw an option for "single stranded RNA" but not "bring amino acids to the ribosome", so I went with the former. However, options C and D are saying "bring amino acids to the ribosome" in AAMC's style, with C being the most correct description.

These two questions are EASY, once we understand how they are wording it. This is AAMC logic, and it always appears obvious after the fact.

But AAMC material is limited, so one can't waste the resources by burning them with wrong logic until one finally learns the correct logic via trial-and-error and sheer exposure.

So, how can one learn this logic in the first place?

Because here I am in year 2026 of our Lord and I just googled a question that I struggled with in one of the section banks and lo and behold I found a seven-year old reddit post about that same question.