Should You Stop Mock Exams the Last Two Weeks Before the IMAT?

Every year we get some version of the same question in the last two weeks before the IMAT: should I keep taking full mocks, or is it too late for them to help? The honest answer is that it depends entirely on what a mock exam is doing for you at that point, and most candidates never actually stop to check.

There's no universal rule here, but there is a wrong way to make the decision, which is to keep doing whatever you've been doing out of habit, without asking whether it's still the best use of the days you have left.

The case for stopping early

A full mock takes half a day to sit and another chunk of time to review properly if you're doing it right. In the final two weeks, that's time you could spend closing specific gaps the last several mocks already told you about. If your error log points clearly at, say, physics formulas or reading comprehension pacing, another full 100-minute mock gives you less new information than an hour of targeted drilling on exactly that weakness. Diminishing returns are real, and by week two, most candidates have already learned what a full mock has to teach them about their overall level.

The case for not stopping

The counterargument isn't about content, it's about conditioning. Stamina, pacing under a real clock, and the specific discomfort of sitting still through a long exam are skills that decay if you stop practicing them, even briefly. A candidate who does nothing but isolated topic drills for two straight weeks can walk into the real exam sharper on content and rustier on endurance than they were ten days earlier. That's a real cost, and it's the reason "just stop entirely" is bad advice for a lot of people.

What actually happens to your score in the final stretch

For most candidates, score movement in the last two weeks comes far more from fixing known, specific mistakes than from raw additional practice volume. A mock exam taken on day twelve before the IMAT and one taken on day four tend to look similar in score unless something concrete changed in between, like a topic that finally clicked or a pacing habit that got corrected. Taking more mocks without changing anything else mostly just confirms the score you already had, which isn't nothing, but it's also not the same as improving it.

A better way to think about the last two weeks

Rather than treating it as a binary choice between "keep mocking" and "stop mocking," split the two weeks in two. Use the first week for one or two more full, timed mocks, specifically to keep your pacing and stamina sharp and to confirm your error log is still accurate. Use the second week almost entirely for targeted review of whatever those mocks and your accumulated error log actually flagged, with at most one shorter, section-level practice session rather than another full run. That sequencing gets you the conditioning benefit without burning your last, most valuable days on repetition instead of correction.

There's no single correct day to stop full mocks. What matters is that each one you take in the final two weeks is still teaching you something you didn't already know, and that the days around it are spent fixing what it found.