Took the MCAT Today - Thoughts

Pre-Med & Medical School Pre-Med Topics
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<p>So I took the august 14th mcat. a lot of it was very surprising.</p>

<p>PS - Hardest section to me. Seemed to start off hard and get progressively easier. I think that overall this section especially shows that no matter how much you study, there will usually be at least one question that just completely catches you off guard and you didn't study it. i won't reveal specifics - i got lucky on one question where they didn't give you the equation, none of my prep books gave much attention to it, and i just got lucky and took an educated guess based solely on the answer choices and am pretty sure i got it right. however, that was luck. if i could go back generally i would memorize the equations a little better and maybe extra equations. there was another one based purely on memorization of something that is probably ambiguous as to whether things like that should be memorized or not. it seemed like a freebie if you memorized it, though i thought it might have been a trick question. i would have also gone more in depth into things that examkrackers and kaplan only briefly touched on. as a side note i forgot how to do math at one point - that kinda sucked</p>

<p>VR - Easiest section to me - surprising since it was the one i was freaking out about the most, but it was actually pleasant. i finished with 2 minutes to spare. there are a lot of differing views on how the passages compare to the aamc tests. i will say definitely for mine at least, the passages were significantly longer, but were much more straightforward. the questions weren't too abstract compared to others i've seen. aamc does compare best. i also used examkrackers. while their verbal strategy is good, their passages really are nothing like the real mcat - the ek passages are much more challenging and many explanations just don't make any sense at all. overall i'm happiest with this section, which really surprises me.</p>

<p>WS - Pointless. Wrote a lot more than usual and tried to purposely sound smart by using a lot of funky transitions and cool sounding words :)</p>

<p>BS - This section annoyed me the most, not for the bio, which for the most part was pretty easy, but surprisingly for the orgo. I was really really angry with the orgo afterwards, since it is usually the easiest and since i am just good at it. many of the questions were arbitrary and tested rote memorization. granted, i guess i should have expected this on memorization, but there was a lot compared with practice tests. one question i just needed to completely guess on since it was so completely bizarre. there were several others that just really annoyed me, though i will not go into specifics, but they were just very ambiguous, as orgo can be sometimes. if i were allowed to go into specifics it'd be obvious why i'm upset with this, but i can't, so oh well. </p>

<p>i'm hoping i did well. definitely many surprises from what i said. for future test takers i really recommend just plain memorizing everything you can. i try to base my learning on concepts, but my particular mcat frequently had memorization which really annoyed me. i still think i did well. usually what happens when i take tests is that i get nervous since i know exactly which questions i got wrong, and then extrapolate that into thinking that i probably got a lot more wrong than just the ones i remember. however, usually the only questions i get wrong on tests in general are the ones that i think about after the test, so hopefully this will be similar! nothing to do now but wait!</p>

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<p>Good luck :)</p>

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<p>Ya, sounds like you did well – when do you find out the results?</p>

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<p>30 days. i’ve actually decided to challenge some of the questions on the exam - basically those stupid orgo ones. i’m actually not one to challenge questions usually, but there were just too many inherent ambiguities in the questions that did not normally appear. physical sciences still ****es me off. looking back on the specific questions i know where tricky, i got about half right and half wrong, so not too bad.</p>

<p>one thing that does seem good is that apparently they use experimental sections on each section, which i did not realize. this isn’t conjecture as this statement is found somewhere on the aamc website. i actually have a feeling that the specific orgo passage that annoyed me may have been the experimental one. this is since the questions were out of the norm relative to the others, and unlike any of the practice exams, this exam had 3 passages on orgo, and mine was a passage that a lot of people didn’t seem to get, so it may be the variable passage.</p>

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<p>also, apparently a decent amount of people voided because of the orgo. it really was pretty bad, the most surprising overall was definitely the difficulty of the orgo.</p>

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<p>I wouldn’t challenge them, you will lose and delay your score. If it was unfair, it will be unfair to everyone and you won’t lose any points.</p>

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<p>waffle may I ask how long did you prepare for the exam and based on how you felt, a possible score you think you may have received?</p>

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<p>mmmcdowe: Really? Is it actually true that I will lose and delay my score? I’m not saying I don’t believe you, I just wanna know what you’re basing that on. I could understand what you mean by delaying the score, but how could I lose my score?</p>

<p>Indianjatt: I prepared for the past 10 weeks, on average 2-3 hours a day for usually 6 days a week, plus I took all the aamc practice tests. I used the examkrackers home study and I used the big kaplan book to supplement. I have no idea what to expect in terms of a possible score. I may have had a better idea previously but now that I found out that they use experimental passages, I don’t know what to expect. I averaged 34-39 on the practice tests, but I personally found them to be much easier than the actual exam, especially on the sciences. I’m hoping for a 12-13 on bio, a 10-11 on physical, and an 11-12 on verbal. But honestly it can go anyway, above those or below, and a lot of it really depends on which passages were experimental. For example, if the orgo passage that annoyed me was experimental, then I think I can get a 13 on bio, but if not, and if one of the easier passages to me was experimental, then it can be a 12 or lower. Similar for physical, but no particular passage really stood out to me. As far as i’m concerned they were all difficult :P</p>

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<p>I mean that you will lose in terms of the contesting on the basis of it being experimental. Experimental questions are NOT used towards your grade (page 4). AMCAS doesn’t specify if an entire passage or just specific questions are experimental. So even if your hard passage had experimental questions in it, it still might hurt you if some are normal questions. You will delay your score because they will put it on hold while you have it hand graded They won’t look at your exam after it has been graded. You have 5 days to file a complaint. It will take at least 4 weeks to have it reviewed, meaning that you will have lost a week at the least, probably at least two.</p>

<p>As far as contesting on the basis of ambiguous or unfair questions, it isn’t worth contesting the MCAT. What you thought to be ambiguous or unfair might have been because of assumptions that you made or missing something in the text. They are very thorough, and even if you win a question or two you probably aren’t going to change your score.</p>

<p><a href=“http://aamc.org/students/mcat/mcatessentials.pdf[/url]”>http://aamc.org/students/mcat/mcatessentials.pdf&lt;/a&gt; (page 14 for contesting rules).</p>

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<p>I read up on what others have said about that o-chem passage. Most agree that it was hard, but that it was fair. They said one of the q’s had a spelling error related to mass spect.</p>

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<p>yeah, that’s a good point. i wouldn’t really be contesting on the basis of it being experimental, they’re independent of each other, but i started also thinking that they were in fact experimental based on the randomness of the questions and also the fact that one of them wasn’t even explicitly listed on the list of information to know for the mcat and wasn’t covered in the passage either. mass spect wasn’t on mine - i think it was the 8 am and i took the 2 pm. no one in 2 pm seemed to get mass spect on theirs. so basically instead of contesting i suppose i should just bank on it being experimental. ironically i previously read the link you gave me, with it being 4-6 weeks and all. for some reason i did not connect that with the fact that we get our scores in 30 days haha.</p>

<p>thanks for the advice on that!</p>

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<p>I’ve always thought that my impressions of a test were meaningless until I received my score. Good luck!</p>

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<p>Did you mean to say that you might not know how well you did until you received your score? Is it because the difficulty of the MCAT test may vary a lot from one test to the next? An analogy is that the class average of a test may be 50 in one year but may be 70 in another year (when a different professor teaches the same class.)</p>

<p>It is often said that a premed class is hard because of the competitive students in it and the curve. Is it similar on MCAT?</p>

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<p>^ Basically what shades_children said. You really just can’t predict based on your impressions due to a number of factors, including variations on difficulty from test to test, the fact that it’s completely different than simply taking practice tests, since there are now experimental passages, and since the curve can vary. </p>

<p>One of my practice tests I ended up taking on a Sunday morning hungover and on 4 hours of sleep and got a 39. Somehow that was much easier content-wise than yesterday’s exam. Hopefully I can do as well as when I was in that state, kinda funny when you think about it:)</p>

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<p>mcat2. Your analogy holds assuming that the same grade is given for the 70 as for the 50 in the two different classes.</p>

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<p>waffle: Hopefully, you get a 39. Then it is golden. :)</p>

<p>I happen to know someone who thought he might get 33 right after the test and it turns out he got 37 in the end.</p>

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<p>Waffle: My daughter took the 2PM test yesterday too and had several of the same impressions as you did.</p>

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<p>^ ^ However, she thought that the orgo questions were straightforward. The PS section surprised her.</p>

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<p>twinmom: Is it the physics portion or the general chemistry portion that surprised her? I remember that BDM once said that the questions on gen. chem. are actually quite difficult. (But we all know that he always has no problem with physics - or on any standardized test. Be it MCAT or LSAT :))</p>

<p>At least your D is ready and go out to fight…unlike my DS who said he is not ready yet. Congratulations to your D and waffle who have passed another hurdle.</p>

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<p>Mcat - I’ll have to ask her and get back to you. She didn’t want to talk about it much yesterday which I respect. </p>

<p>She had hoped to feel much better about it based upon her practice tests. However, I’m in the camp that you can’t really know what you got until the actual scores roll in.</p>