Frequently Asked Questions

The earlier your start working with our team, the better. Early on, you will be focusing on building strong foundational knowledge. Medicine is cumulative, and learning how to tackle questions and the vast breadth of content during your pre-clinical years will serve you well during your clinical years and residency.

Many of our students, though, do find Medlearnity during residency or afterward when preparing for board exams. Knowledge mastery and test-taking expectations increase as exams become much more difficult at this stage.

At Medlearnity, we focus our teaching and guidance on your current situation - so if you have an exam in two weeks, we'll have a different approach than for a student with an exam in two months. 

The easiest way to get started is by booking a trial session. These sessions are free as if you decide not to move forward, the trial discount is refunded. We use a minimal trial-reservation fee as this helps us confirm trials are booked by real students and eliminates spam-bookings which are a problem for any online service. You can always email (support@medlearnity.com) if you have any questions, but we answer study-specific questions during your trial over Zoom. Overall, our organization prefers email and Zoom meetings as our primary communication channels, which allows our staff and tutors to work with students very effectively.

After a session, you will receive an email with a summary of the topics you covered, a recording of the video, and a place where you can note issues and subjects you want to cover for the next session!

Our tutors are the top educators in their respective fields. Becoming a tutor at Medlearnity requires a passion for education, a deep interest in helping other physicians-in-training, and an exceptional track record of exam performance. Every tutor brings their unique talents to Medlearnity, but as an organization, we also have established best practices to maintain a very high-quality educational experience. Meet our tutors!

Our sessions are usually weekly or bi-weekly, but this is at the discretion of what you decide with your tutor. If you are taking a critical exam in a few weeks, meeting more frequently is advised, and alternatively, if the assessment is in a few months, meeting once a week maybe most appropriate. Fundamentally, more educational feedback from your tutor is always beneficial, assuming you have the time to self-study and prepare in between sessions.

A simple rule of thumb is: For every 2-hours of tutoring, you should perform at least 16-hours of dedicated self-studying.

Yes! During your first session, we will share an interactive template in Google Docs to document your progress. This template dynamically allows you to track your progress and provides a channel for easy feedback from your tutor during subsequent sessions. We have noticed that students who use our planner more consistently benefit from more significant improvements in their performance.

Medlearnity offers flexible payment options between credit card (Stripe), PayPal, and payment plans over time through Affirm.

Yes! Every student is offered a single discounted trial for their first session at Medlearnity.

We only provide one trial per student and if a student is interested in trying a second session prior to purchasing a package, they can purchase individual hours. We hope the trial session helps you get a feel for our teaching or admissions support!

At Medlearnity, we use email for all support and Zoom for all meetings. Sticking to these two communication channels allows us to provide high-quality responses. Our physician educators also occasionally guide the support team, another significant benefit of using email for support.

We believe that across our FAQs, reviews, and scheduled Zoom meetings, you should have everything you need to decide on a package and excel at your objective! Otherwise, please email us at support@medlearnity.com, and we'll do our best to help you.

We focus on a variety of techniques to help students improve. There is a strong emphasis on question-based learning, where we simulate an exam question but then hone in salient points that the student missed. It's not always about getting the question correct, but instead getting the question correct efficiently and with the proper emphasis on salient clinical details.

On rare occasions, students may have severe personal circumstances outside of their exam or assessment. These students usually cannot commit to studying regularly, which comes up in conversations with them from the first or second session. In these circumstances, we advise the student to reschedule their exam until their situation is resolved. Otherwise, students who can study and meet with us regularly show consistent, substantial improvements in performance!

For a student taking an exam in 3-4 weeks, 10 or 20 hours of tutoring provides a substantial amount of practice and feedback. For students with a longer study duration, we recommend 30 or more hours. An important metric is how much time a student invests in self-study between tutoring sessions. If a student is studying full-time (8+ hours a day), meeting 2-3 times per week is a worthwhile investment given the amount of content covered. We like to think of tutoring + self-studying as synergistic forces that complement each other.

Medlearnity tutors for all US medical exams, from MCAT, USMLE, COMLEX, to advanced board examinations. We also help students with admissions to medical school and residency.

All tutoring takes place on Medlearnity's Zoom platform, recorded and shared after the session.

Yes, absolutely! All sessions are recorded and, post-session, a password-protected link will be provided to access these recordings. Please note, however, that these sessions are only stored for a limited period before deletion, but you may preserve them permanently by downloading to your own computer. These recordings serve to maintain the highest quality of our service as they are frequently used for training purposes, enabling our senior educators to guide tutors on optimizing teaching techniques.

Improvements for our students are substantial. Students who complete >20-hours of tutoring often improve their scores by 20-30 percentile points. We've even had students who have previously failed a high-stakes exam like USMLE Step 1 work with us for Step 2 CK to score in the high 90th percentile with >260 scores. One of the essential factors in tutoring results is a student's diligence to self-study and our organization methods. 

All tutors at Medlearnity have a series of interviews and training sessions before tutoring students. They also shadow other senior tutors to learn from their techniques and methods. We also closely review tutoring sessions as an organization to identify improvement areas and ask students for feedback after every session. The result is a very high-quality educational experience! 

Yes, if a student would like to try a different tutor at Medlearnity, we are more than happy to facilitate this. Sometimes we even suggest a student try a session with a particular tutor given some specialized expertise – i.e., a student is interested in pediatrics, and one of our tutors is an advanced resident in pediatrics. Tutors are always in sync through session recordings and session notes.

Yes. Medlearnity offers to add 20% additional hours to any package if your score doesn't improve on an official exam compared to a prior official practice exam. For example, if a student completes a 40-hour package and does not improve from their official practice exam, we will add 8 additional hours for free. (Please email your tutor your official practice exam at the start of tutoring - we ask for this when you schedule your trial). We strongly recommend students prepare rigorously before any scheduled exam to prevent the chances of failure. Retaking an exam after a failed attempt is always much more challenging, so our team works towards preventing this situation at all costs.

No! At Medlearnity, your hours can be used for future exams and/or admissions services. We believe in providing maximal flexibility for our students, so there is no pressure to use your hours by a certain timeframe.

Lastly, if you have remaining hours and don't anticipate being able to use them, we can refund them prorated to the number of hours completed. See "What is your refund policy?".

For Medlearnity packages, if a student decides they no longer need all the hours in their current tutoring package, the tutoring package can be prorated to the number of hours completed. For example, if a student purchases a 20-hour package and completes 14-hours of tutoring, they have the option to switch their package to a 10-hour-package hourly rate.

Medlearnity has a 24-hour cancelation policy for all scheduled sessions. If any emergency prevents a student from attending a session, they must email their tutor as soon as possible before the session. Otherwise, if a session cancelation occurs within 24 hours of the session without discussion with the tutor, the scheduled time is deducted from the student's tutoring hours. As always, the support team does its best to handle these situations on a case-by-case basis.

No-show Situation: If the student doesn't attend a session and does not notify the tutor before the session, the scheduled time is deducted from the student's tutoring hours. Trial session no-shows cannot be rescheduled.

Yes! Once you have a package you can continue to add additional hours at your current package's hourly rate. For example, if you purchase a 10-hour package, you can add an additional 5-10 hours at the 10-hour-package hourly rate. (We share a coupon for you to access your package's hourly rate.)

Yes! Most exams and services have the same hourly rate, and your hours can be used across all services. For example, admissions and tutoring hours are interchangeable.

There are a few specialized advanced board exams that have different hourly rates, so please feel free to email us if you have any questions here.

Medlearnity keeps its prices up-to-date and transparent. If there are any discounts available, we will email our students and reflect any prices changes in our store.

For international students, Medlearnity offers a tailored pricing and workflow. While we're unable to provide a free trial to the broader international medical community, we happily offer the first session at over 50% off our regular rates.

Additionally, we extend a 5% discount on all tutoring packages. Rest assured, we bring exceptional expertise to international students and have successfully collaborated with numerous IMGs. For questions on getting started, please contact support@medlearnity.com.

No limits! Our admissions consulting is flexible and based on the hours used. We can usually support several drafts, and if more feedback is needed after your hours are complete, a few additional hours can be added as needed.

No limits! Our admissions consulting is flexible and based on the hours used. We recommend practicing with two mock interviews before your first interview.