<p>While these are obviously not to be taken as the word of god since MCAT and GPA are by no means the whole picture, they do give you some idea as to what the landscape looks like.</p>
<p>Use your SAT percentile as a rough guide to what kind of MCAT score range to think about but keep in mind that the tests are very different and the test takers are also very different (much stronger for MCAT) so it's safest to assume that you won't get a higher percentile than your SAT score.</p>
<p>Also, unless you went to one of the tippy top private schools in the country or really slacked off in high school - your GPA in college is almost certainly going to be lower than it was in high school. It’s probably not that your school has “grade deflation” or “tough grading,” it’s that you were the big fish in a little pond and now that you’re in a bigger pond you’ll realize there are plenty of other fish your size or bigger. The same thing will happen when you get to medical school - an even bigger pond with even bigger fish.</p>
<p>I agree with what you’re saying, I just find it hard to believe that it doesn’t matter what undergrad you went to. Because someone could pull off a 4.0 at like cal state channel islands, for example, but if they’d gone to Harvard, their gpa may be much lower? So don’t admissions take this into account when looking at your gpa?</p>
<p>My experience has been that if you have a high MCAT score AND went to one of the very top few universities in the country – think top 8 or so – you can get a little leeway on your grades. Otherwise, I haven’t seen it.</p>
<p>There will always be exceptions but my main point is there are a lot more people with 4.0s in high school than there are in college. Just because your grades go down in college doesn’t mean the college is “doing anything to you”</p>
<p>Additionally, if you look at the average MCAT scores of applicants, they tend to be higher at the higher ranked schools. Look at the table. You are better off with a 39 and 3.0 then a 26 and 4.0</p>
<p>I have seen an admissions committee question the effort/rigor required to get a 4.0 at a state school and in the same session not question a 3.8 at an Ivy League school.</p>
<p>while I agree with you, I still shake my head at the thought of putting weight in those statements - especially since that 2008 data is now 5 years old (and not paired with MCAT data). I’m guessing the trend didn’t hold up?</p>
<p>Hm. I do think accepted student GPA is a useful metric, although 3.55 wasn’t actually very low in 2008 and IWBB is right that you have to control for MCAT scores. But I’ve not directly observed specific instances of grade favoritism to those two schools among my friends, unless they went to a handful of really elite institutions.</p>
That’s what JHU has on their pre-health site today. </p>
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<p>I just quoted what they claimed - nothing more nothing less. The fact that they don’t say anything about MCAT, to me, means that they really don’t have whole lot to brag about on that front If they did, they wouldn’t hesitate milking that too in their efforts to lure a few more gullible pre-meds. WUStL is actually quite brazen in claiming a “reputation bump”.</p>
<p>Response to post #1. I am wondering is there any data that shows the correlation between Mcat and Sat scores. The ways the two tests are scored are very different. Sat scores are curved but Mcat I’d not. It seems Mcat is more relates to what you learned in school, while Sat is not. Also for some kids who mature later, or they’ve found their passion and study harder than on high school, they could probably do much better in Mcat than they did Sat in high school.</p>
<p>Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I717 using Tapatalk 2</p>
<p>Of course there is a correlation. Is it an r^2=1 absolutely perfect predictor? Of course not, but student who do well on their SATs are more likely to do well on their MCATs and students who do poorly on their SATs are more likely to do poorly on their MCATs</p>
<p>Not quite. I am pretty far removed from my SAT and I don’t keep up with that info now so maybe someone else can fill it in, but the MCAT is curved and largely does not test you “on what you learned.” </p>
<p>The MCAT as a whole is not curved, but each section is. Someone always gets a 15 on each section, but there is no guarantee that the people getting 15 on any one section get it on any other which is why 45s are ludicrously rare to the point where it may never have happened yet.</p>
<p>The MCAT does require a fundamental core of scientific knowledge, but the majority of the questions are based on passages presenting new information and the questions test you on that. Some questions can end up being pretty fact recall based, but for the most part it’s a critical thinking exam and I don’t think the SAT is so vastly different.</p>
<p>The biggest difference between the SAT and the MCAT is the testing pool. Nearly 3 million students take the SAT each year and they represent essentially any high school senior planning on going to some sort of college to study anything. ([College</a> Board SAT and SAT Subject Test FAQs](<a href=“News and Press Releases - Newsroom | College Board”>News and Press Releases - Newsroom | College Board)) According to my link above, just under 90k people take the MCAT in a year, and these are students who have been accepted to college, taken the majority if not all of the pre-med requirements and have decided they want to go to medical school. The test taking pool is much more competitive.</p>
<p>SAT is an easy test based primarily on the middle school academics. Many top kids burned because they did not realize that they actually have to refresh material way back from the middle school.<br>
MCAT seems to be more or less based on college level and most will not know many answers. However, keep in mind that there are MS who also take MCAT and they might know much more in certain section than your average UG pre-med.
And again, most spend few hours preparing for SAT / ACT. And again, most pre-meds 9with exceptions noted here on CC) would spend few months (few hours every day) preparing for an MCAT.
I am not sure how simple (actually degrading) test like SAT could be compared to an MCAT.<br>
However, there is a correlation (again with exceptions) between ACT and an MCAT. and again, this correlation could exist mostly because of certain individual work habits, not any other aspects. Say, if you have not prepared for one but work very hard preparing for another, I do not think that there will be much correlation between your ACT(SAT)/MCAT test scores.</p>
<p>As SAT and ACT are mostly aptitude tests, formulating a hypothesis that those who do well in those tests tend to do well academically (GPA, MCAT, USMLE etc.), barring screw-ups, laziness, misfortunes etc, is not really that outlandish. And, the abstracts IWBB posted, unsurprisingly, validate that.</p>
<p>^exactly. And all I was getting at in post #1 really was that someone who studied their butt off for an SAT score in the 80th percentile should probably not look at an MCAT distribution and say “well if I get a 40+…” Obviously it could happen but the smart bet is that it won’t.</p>
<p>^Actually, I heard about one predictor for an MCAT being within 2 point of ACT, yes “barring screw-ups, laziness, misfortunes etc,”. It was exactly correct for my D. and a positive one since it went 2 points up. She prep for ACT for a bit (about 1 hr / day for 5 days), but prep. whole tons for MCAT. So, based solely on her experience (I do not have any other), I would say that MCAT score relates to SAT/ACT scores and the amount of effort. I do not think that D. would get much higher MCAT with more efforts than she actually has put in. The reason for my statement is that her practice score at the end of prep. period was pretty stable and her real score happened to be 2 point below her best practice score, which some said is also a good predictor.</p>
<p>Yes, MCAT is the equalizer but low GPA (3.5 or below) might not even get secondaries. </p>
<p>The other question for adcom is , 35 MCAT, 3.5 (one of the major with low average GPA) vs. 30 MCAT, 3.8-3.9 (one of the major with high average GPA) if all else is equal, which one would be more likely to receive an interview?</p>
<p>I think that once a applicant meets a certain cut-off (MCAT +GPA), then it’s the applicant’s LORs, PS and ECs that determine who gets the interview–not the numbers.</p>
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<p>This is probably an overstatement. While this may be true at some very tippy top med schools (I’m thinking of schools that have reputations as “numbers wh***s”), the GPA cut off is often lower than a 3.5. (I have this info from a individual who writes the computer scoring programs for medical school adcomms.) Some medical schools even re-weight and re-calculate AMCAS GPAs when screening applicants. (Same source.)</p>
<p>I will also comment that I had a kid with two of the tough majors on the CBS list who took a hit on her GPA, but more than made up for it on the MCAT–she got secondaries for every school she applied to. Even from those schools who screen their secondaries.</p>
<p>Here’s a AAMC report on how admission directors weight various factors when A) considering offering an interview invitation and B) offering admission.</p>
If they did, they wouldn’t hesitate milking that too in their efforts to lure a few more gullible pre-meds. WUStL is actually quite brazen in claiming a “reputation bump”.</p>