How our content is made
Written for boards prep
Each explanation is written specifically for USMLE Step 1 and Step 2 study — a concise, high-yield summary first, then a deeper pass on pathophysiology, clinical significance, and the key associations a student is expected to know. Every entry is structured into the same fields: a short summary, fuller detail, a medical category, organ-system tags, and the references it draws on.
Grounded in standard references
Explanations are written to reflect the established medical-education canon that boards questions are built from — the standard textbooks and review resources medical students already use. We ask for evidence-based, board-relevant facts rather than fringe detail, and store the references each explanation cites so you can see where a fact comes from.
Kept in sync, automatically
When you study, the add-on keeps its local glossary current by quietly pulling new and updated explanations in the background. So when an entry is improved on our side, the corrected version reaches your cards on the next sync — no manual updates, no reinstall.
Improved by the people using it
Spot something off? Open any term’s popup and hit Reportwith a quick note. Reports flow into a review queue so explanations can be corrected at the source and pushed back out to everyone. You can also submit terms we don’t cover yet — when enough students request the same one, it gets added to the glossary.
How the MCAT library is checked
The MCAT question bank and the full-length exams come from one library of passage sets and standalone questions, written for the exam’s four sections and sorted by content category and skill. A question reaches you only after these checks.
Solved blind
A grader takes each passage set first, the way a student would: the passage and its figures and the questions, but no answer key.
Audited against the key
A second pass puts the grader’s answers beside the key and the explanations and looks for the strongest objection to each question. It asks whether the keyed answer is the only defensible one, whether the explanation holds up, whether the figures match the text, whether the passage is needed, and whether the wrong options are fair.
Two graders, and both must pass
The whole check runs twice, with two independent graders. A question stays in the library only if both rule it sound. A passage set left with too few questions is dropped.
Exam passages are kept apart
The passages in a full-length exam never appear in the question bank, so you haven’t practiced on an exam passage before you sit it.
Reports pull questions
Choose Report a problem under the explanation of any MCAT question. The question leaves the bank until we have looked at it, and a passage set that falls below its minimum goes with it.
MCAT term explanations
The explanations behind the MCAT term dictionary are written for the exam’s content. A sample gets a second, independent check before publishing, and all of them pass automated screens. A term that fails is rewritten and checked again, or held back.
Using Medusa responsibly
Medusa is a study aid for exam preparation. Its explanations are written to help you learn and recall high-yield facts for the USMLE and the MCAT. They are not medical advice, not a clinical reference, and must never be used to diagnose, treat, or guide the care of a real patient.
Automatically generated content can occasionally be incomplete or wrong. Treat Medusa the way you’d treat a well-made set of shared flashcards: a fast, convenient layer over your studying that still deserves a sanity-check against your primary resources before you commit a fact to memory. When you find a mistake, reporting it makes the glossary better for the next student.
What we don’t claim
We don’t claim that a physician hand-verifies every individual card — at glossary scale that wouldn’t be honest. What we do is generate explanations against established board-prep material, keep everything in sync, and correct entries as users report them. Transparency about that process is the point of this page.
The same goes for the MCAT library. Its questions are checked by two independent graders, not read one by one by a person, and a question that passes can still be wrong. That is why every MCAT question has a Report a problem link.
Want to see the explanations for yourself? Browse the public glossary or read more about the product on the about page. Questions about content accuracy? Email team@medusaprep.com.