What It Actually Does to a Friendship When You're Both Prepping for the IMAT

Having a sibling or best friend who's also prepping for the IMAT sounds like it should make the whole thing easier. Someone who actually gets the syllabus, the mock exam stress, the weird specificity of worrying about Logical Reasoning.

Sometimes it genuinely does help that way. It also creates a kind of comparison that's harder to shake off than anything on a forum, because you can't just close the tab on someone you see every day, and most pairs don't realize that until it's already causing friction.

Why this comparison lands differently

Comparing yourself to strangers online is something you can mostly choose to stop doing. Comparing yourself to someone you see every day, whose opinion of you matters and who you genuinely want to see succeed, isn't something you can opt out of the same way. Every mock score gap between you two carries weight that a stranger's score never would, even when neither of you means for it to.

The two patterns that tend to show up

One is quiet withdrawal: both of you start downplaying your real scores to each other, or studying separately to avoid the awkwardness of comparing notes. The other is an uneven tutor-student dynamic, where the stronger person starts carrying a lot of the explaining, and resentment builds on both sides, one person feeling used as a free tutor, the other feeling like a project rather than a peer - one of the specific ways studying with others can backfire.

What's worth separating from the start

Studying the same material together, trading notes, and quizzing each other on content is usually genuinely useful and rarely the source of the strain. The strain tends to come from constant, informal progress check-ins, "how'd you do," asked every few days, almost reflexively. Keep the content work shared if that's working for you, but agree to talk about actual scores and standing less often and more deliberately, not every time either of you finishes a mock.

What actually protects the friendship

Decide together, early, what you will and won't share, a general sense of trend versus exact numbers, for example, and hold to it even when one of you is clearly ahead. It also helps to say out loud, more than once, that this isn't zero-sum. One of you doing well doesn't cost the other a seat, and one of you struggling with a section doesn't make the other's progress less real.

Prepping alongside someone close to you can genuinely be an advantage. It just takes more deliberate boundaries than prepping alongside a classmate you're not emotionally invested in, and most pairs figure that out the hard way instead of deciding it upfront.