<p>Do schools ever publish what the average MCAT score is of their pre-med students? If so, does anybody know which schools have high MCAT averages? Thanks.</p>
<p>Here's a guess: it's probably those with very high incoming SAT averages.</p>
<p>If you get the MSAR, u can see what the range is for every medical school in the conuntry</p>
<p>I assumed he meant undergraduate schools, but there's certainly ambiguity.</p>
<p>BDM,</p>
<p>I think he wants to know if the Stats of incoming class are published by Med Schools.</p>
<p>Universityfella,
You can check out <a href="http://www.mdapplicant.com%5B/url%5D">www.mdapplicant.com</a> to get some idea although the stats posted on this site are not official.</p>
<p>Not sure if each school publishes these in MSAR, are they BDM?</p>
<p>Actually, my interpretation is the same as BDM's and my answer would be the same as BDM's. The colleges with the smartest incoming freshman end up with applicants with the highest MCAT scores.</p>
<p>The OP will be back eventually to settle what he means. Regardless, each medical school's average is published in USN. The MSAR has the median among admitted students; USN has the mean among matriculating students.</p>
<p>norcalguy:</p>
<p>
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The colleges with the smartest incoming freshman end up with applicants with the highest MCAT scores.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>I think it's more likely that the colleges with the best-testing freshmen end up with applicants with the highest MCAT scores. There's a certain amount of intelligence needed to do well on standardized testing, but just being smart isn't going to be enough.</p>
<p>Yeah, I meant undergraduate schools. So there aren't certain schools within the first tier that prepare students better than others? Are you guys saying that it is more about the intellect of the test taker than the institution he is attending? Thanks.</p>
<p>
[quote]
Are you guys saying that it is more about the intellect of the test taker than the institution he is attending?
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Yup .</p>
<p>Okay, thanks.</p>
<p>Interesting question. There probably is a reasonably good correlation with SAT scores and MCAT scores, independent of the school attended. I suppose that there may be someone with a high SAT score who ended up at a school that has few students applying to medical school and therefore did not take the courses to prepare adequately. Even then, there is a lot of test material and/or courses to prepare for the MCAT if it is not covered in the applicant's school courses. I do think there is correlation with both intelligence and test-taking skills in the MCAT. </p>
<p>The correlation between MCAT scores and MSLE is not as strong. The latter test is very much knowledge-based although in step 2 and 3, clinical acumen as well as knowledge is tested. Some lower-ranked medical schools specifically tailor their curriculae so that their students will score well in order to boost their reputation. Many top schools may use the requirements as guidelines for curriculae, but do not teach for the exam. Again, since many of their students were good test takers to begin with, the schools do fine without focusing on the exam. Additionally, since it is a licensing exam (albeit the scores are used in competitive residency selection), it is basically a pass/fail exam. A good student at a top school with an average score proabably will still do fine w/r residency programs.</p>
<p>Actually there was a massive study (thousands of students) that showed a very high correlation between MCAT and USMLE scores. I think it was about 0.7. This was higher than undergrad gpa vs USMLE, and knowing a student's MCAT provided almost all the predictive information about what USMLE score that student would get. Including college gpa along with MCAT added very little, and the selectivity of the college had no additional predictive value.
Academic Medicine Oct 2005, I believe.</p>
<p>To the OP: I don't know of any centralized source of MCAT scores by undergrad institution. Many colleges release the stats for their own applicants, but many do not. Interpret the results with caution, since they generally do not include students who took the MCAT's and got such a low score that they did not apply to med school. So the figure reported as mean will be biased up from the mean of all students who took the test.</p>
<p>Studies have confirmed that SAT is a very good predictor of MCAT scores. So good that med schools probably would select more or less the same people if they used SAT scores instead of MCAT's. </p>
<p>High entering SAT's implies high exiting MCAT's.</p>
<p>Afan: To a limited extent, some do use SAT scores instead of MCAT's for a few students. The BS/BA/MD programs assume a high correlation, but generally use only single sitting CR and Math scores.</p>
<p>As BDM suggests, if a college's 75th percentile SAT is 1520, then the 10 to 20% of students who eventually will take the MCAT's will be a pretty bright bunch.</p>
<p>.7 is gigantic. Yowza.</p>
<p>I wonder if they managed to correct for omitted variables/endogeneity. High MCAT scores might be correlated to high USMLE scores because high MCAT score students tend to go to Baylor, UCSF, etc. Unless measures are in place to correct for that, that's a risk they're running.</p>
<p>I think this is pretty clearly not the case, not least because several well-regarded schools (UCSF, Pritzker, etc.) don't have very impressive average board scores while some somewhat-lower-ranked schools actually do (USC). But I'm curious to see if the authors addressed it.</p>
<p>But then, you could argue that the other, way, too: don't those schools have high MCAT scores coming in? So what's the deal? Maybe those schools much longer low-end tails with USMLEs than they did with MCATs, while other schools have much less variation in MCAT scores... or longer upward tails... or... something.</p>
<p>The unit of analysis was the individual student, rather than the medical school. They did not test any hypotheses about the effect of the med school attended on USMLE scores. So it is possible that students with high MCAT's went to medical schools with high mean MCAT's. In fact, since this portion of the study included all students in the US, this effect must have been present. They did not address whether the high MCAT schools had higher USMLE's than their MCAT's alone would have predicted.</p>
<p>They found that MCAT predicted USMLE about 0.7 for Step 1, and 0.6 for Steps 2 and 3.</p>
<p>Some of this is clearly a matter of how "smart" the students are. The VR section, which apparently is highly g-loaded, is a strong predictor of subsequent academic difficulty (for low scores) or distinction (for high scores).</p>
<p>Has there ever been a study correlating SAT with MCAT scores? My point, albeit speculative, was that there may be a higher correlation between these tests than between MCAT and USMLE scores. I would bet (at least a cup of coffee) the correlation between SAT and MCAT scores will be higher than 0.7.</p>
<p>These people call it "strong" with no clarification of what that means:
<a href="http://www.naahp.org/abstract_fourflat.htm%5B/url%5D">http://www.naahp.org/abstract_fourflat.htm</a></p>