<p>BTW: You wouldn't think that many people score 5's on a section but in 2007, more people scored a 15 (total) or less on the MCAT than a 35+.</p>
<p>So the best way to study for MCAT is to improve your reading skills?..since it doesn't require any in-depth scientific knowledge...</p>
<p>Edit: I just found how 36 is pretty damn good. Only 1.6% of all MCAT takers in 2007...I realized it's near impossible to get over 40...
Let me lower the standard a bit..say 32?</p>
<p>I wonder if a 5 on the MCAT is more common than a 5 on an AP?</p>
<p>Take your AP classes. They might not directly correlate to what you'll need to know for the MCAT, but they'll be difficult, and so will the AP tests. They'll get you ready for long days of testing, which are commonplace in med school. </p>
<p>AP classes will make college science and physics courses less difficult, in a relative way. Kind of like how running extra laps and lifting weights in the pre-season for a sport will have you less tired and performing better when the game comes.</p>
<p>As for me, I thought one of the hardest parts of the MCAT was the sheer length of the thing. I showed up at the exam facility at around 7, registration was at 8, and we didn't get out of there until after 4. Since they've gone electronic and cut some time off the thing, it might make it easier to avoid test fatigue.</p>
<p>I thought the verbal section was the most difficult. But then again, the passages were lots of existentialist blather, and I was on some pretty heavy pain medicine for an ankle I had broken playing lacrosse a couple weeks earlier. Probably wasn't the best idea to take a nap during that section.</p>
<p>The concern about AP exams is that some schools will then FORCE you to use them and skip over intro classes. So you need to be careful about that.</p>
<p>who can provide a list of schools that force to use the AP Scores and those who dont?</p>
<p>There are 2500 four-year colleges in the US. Such a list would be ridiculous.</p>
<p>By the end of my HS career, I'll have: AP Calc BC, AP Stat, AP Bio, AP Chem, AP Phys B (and maybe C), AP Eng, AP Lit (and AP Econ, AP Comp Sci A & AB, AP Art History but those are irrelevant I believe). Someone from my school last year had the same credits, went to JHU, cashed them in, and started out as a first semester sophomore. I'm wondering if this is an advisable thing to do because I feel more or less like many of the classes taken freshman year are GPA boosters for premeds (she ended up taking orgo as soon as she started :)). Is it better to cash the credits or take the easy courses?</p>
<p>Your friend disadvantaged herself in two important ways.</p>
<p>First, by "skipping" a year and a half of college, she now has (at most) five semesters of coursework to present to admissions committees, and that's already assuming she doesn't go straight to medical school. Five is probably okay, but three definitely would have harmed her. A lot.</p>
<p>Second, she would have had to fill her medical school prerequisites somehow, since not all medical schools accept AP credits. So she didn't just skip over relatively straightforward intro classes, she actually had to replace them with harder ones.</p>
<p>The harm that I've seen come to students who rush through college is more serious than these two factors can explain, since even taking time off doesn't seem to help, but I've never come up with a satisfactory explanation (correlation rather than causation, perhaps).</p>