You can get admitted to med
school. Let there be no doubt about that. However, it is
an extremely competitive process and it's made much more
difficult by avoidable applicant mistakes such as
sitting for the MCAT multiple times.
Med school admissions committees can see all of your scores for the
past five years, although many accept the most recent score as the official
one. Then the admissions committees may wonder
why you didn't wait until you were ready to take the
test.
How Admissions Committees
Interpret Scores
Put yourself in the position of the
admissions committee. In front of you are two solid
applicants competing for the last remaining spot in your
class. They are identical in every way with impressive
grades, majors, extracurricular activities, interview
impressions, story themes and wow factors. However,
Applicant A took the MCAT three times to achieve a score
of 30. Applicant B took the test once and achieved that
score. Admissions committees will always choose
Applicant B who only needed one attempt to achieve his
desired score.
Preparation Is Key
The MCAT is an extremely rigorous
test that generally requires hundreds of hours of
studying. Give yourself adequate time to prepare and
know which courses cover material you will find on the
MCAT.
To give yourself every possible
advantage in the admission process, you have to start
planning well in advance.
Know what to study. This may sound
straight forward, but too many test takers study
material unnecessarily either because they think the
material will be covered or because they are the
recipients of bad MCAT advice. One of the best sources
for what to study is The Gold Standard, by Brett
Ferdinand, MD.
Self Study v
Tutor v Prep Course
Should you self study, hire a
tutor, or take a course? Since we're not a test prep company,
we feel very comfortable offering impartial advice on
this matter and here's what we want you to do.
Take a diagnostic practice
test. We strongly recommend the free practice test
available at
www.e-mcat.com. Take it under "simulated" conditions. This means turn off your
cell phone, time yourself, and generally replicate
the conditions you will have at the actual testing.
Score the test. How did you
do? Clearly, if you aced the test, you don't need to
prepare further. You simply need to schedule a time
to take the test. If you aced much of the test and
only need to focus on a few sections, then read the
answer explanations for the questions that you
missed. Do they make sense? If so, you can probably
get away with self studying. If, however, the
explanations are not clear, you may benefit from a
tutor since a prep course is going to cover every
part of the MCAT, including parts you have already
mastered.
Interpret your results. If the
diagnostic reveals you need help across the board
and the answer explanations are not entirely clear,
then you may benefit from a prep course.
Test
Anxiety
From our conversations with
thousands of MCAT test takers since 1996, we estimate
that test anxiety probably affects about 25% to 30% of
the population. Test anxiety, as we define it, means
that a test taker does significantly better on practice
exams taken under simulated conditions in the comfort of
their own place than they do when they take the test for
real.
So, if someone is consistently
earning 35s on practice exams suddenly gets sweaty palms
and a rapid heart beat when taking the exam for real and
pulls a 25, we would quantify that as 10 points worth of
test anxiety. That test taker should not study more.
(After all, they know the material well enough to score
a 35!) Fortunately, there are some competent
professionals who have proven to be highly effective at
helping relieve test anxiety.
Final
Thoughts
In conclusion, if you have not
already taken the MCAT, wait. When your practice test
scores have reached a plateau and you are not seeing the
benefit from further studying then you are ready.
Alternatively, if you achieve very high practice scores
take the test as soon as possible and get it out of the
way so you can move on to other critical admissions
tasks such as developing strong story themes and wow
factors.
If you have any questions about your test prep strategy,
please call us at 703.242.5885 and we'll be glad to help
you.
