Med school admissions experts say premeds who have received good grades in college shouldn’t assume that they can easily achieve a high score on the Medical College Admission Test, or MCAT.
The MCAT is harder than a traditional college test, partly because the MCAT is a comprehensive, interdisciplinary exam that covers multiple science subjects, such as biology, physics and chemistry. In addition to testing scientific knowledge, the MCAT tests verbal skills by requiring premeds to read and interpret social science and humanities passages.
The MCAT is also much longer than a typical college final. It lasts approximately seven and a half hours for test-takers who use the optional breaks between various sections of the exam. Experts also warn that the test is more of a marathon than a sprint and that achieving an exceptional MCAT score demands intellectual endurance.
Another challenging aspect of the MCAT is that it’s designed to determine whether a student has absorbed the intricate details of a technical field like organic chemistry or biochemistry. Plus, the MCAT is concept-focused and information recall usually isn’t sufficient to come up with a correct answer to an MCAT question, though memorization may help premeds answer certain MCAT questions quickly. Experts emphasize that being able to remember facts from undergraduate science courses won’t automatically result in a high score, because the MCAT requires students to demonstrate mastery of their premed courses by using the concepts taught in those courses to solve problems.
The MCAT test creators “don’t reward you just for knowing something,” says Petros Minasi Jr., director of premedical programs at Kaplan Test Prep. “They reward you for knowing something and being able to apply it. That’s how you get questions right.”
[Learn last-minute tips to study smart for the MCAT.]
Minasi says the MCAT’s emphasis on problem-solving and analysis is designed to reveal whether an aspiring physician has strong critical thinking skills. Because a doctor’s job often involves diagnosing a medical patient who presents a long list of symptoms, experts say it is essential for premeds to demonstrate their ability to recognize patterns.
Danielle Purtell, a first-year medical student at Tulane University School of Medicine in New Orleans, says that MCAT questions often bombard test-takers with a series of facts, including both important information and extraneous details. The job of an MCAT test-taker is to determine which facts matter or are irrelevant, she says.
The same issue-spotting skills can be applied to clinical diagnosis courses, Purtell says. “Patients give you a lot that you don’t need and you have to read between the lines to glean out what’s important and what isn’t,” she says.
[Select premed courses that will prepare you for the MCAT.]
Purtell adds that it’s prudent for premeds to focus on studying the science subjects they didn’t excel at in college. A knowledge gap in one science discipline will not only hurt premed students’ ability to answer an MCAT question on that subject, but also limit their odds of getting the correct answer to an interdisciplinary MCAT question.
Experts warn that premeds who were capable of cramming for a college final and getting an “A” on that final would be unwise to try that strategy when preparing for the MCAT. Purtell advises premeds to schedule their MCAT test date months in advance, taking into consideration how much time they can realistically expect to study per week. She also suggests taking an MCAT prep course.
Dr. McGreggor Crowley, a pediatrician who earned his medical degree at Harvard Medical School and an admissions counselor at the admissions consulting firm IvyWise, says premeds often spend months preparing for the MCAT and use a variety of test prep techniques, such as taking practice exams, enrolling in prep courses and using question banks.
“The exam is focused in that it tests specific, advanced knowledge about a subject, and it is broad, in that test-takers must understand a wide range of material from seemingly disparate subjects,” Crowley said via email. “If anything, it’s more like a cumulative exam testing multiple years of college classes,” he said.
Purtell recommends that premeds spend at least 300 hours prepping for the MCAT. She suggests using those hours efficiently by focusing exclusively on the topics that are tested on the MCAT, and not memorizing details that are unlikely to be tested on the exam.
“The beauty of the MCAT is you don’t have to know everything about everything,” Purtell says. “You just have to know the hot topics and what in med school we call the high-yield info about all of the subjects, because the high-yield info is what they’re going to pull those interdisciplinary questions from.”
Experts say that strengthening your grasp of the big ideas that are tested on the MCAT (think: how electric voltage works) is more important than memorizing nitty-gritty details, since the test is more focused on analysis than the regurgitation of information.
Minasi says one way to get a good sense of which topics are fair game for MCAT exam is to look at the prep materials produced by the organization that creates the MCAT – the Association of American Medical Colleges, or AAMC. The AAMC’s What’s on the MCAT Exam? webpage includes a comprehensive list of the topics tested.
[Learn how to match MCAT prep to your learning style.]
The MCAT includes many interdisciplinary test problems, which require premeds to use concepts they learned in several science courses, Minasi says. Premeds should take note of concepts they’ve seen in multiple science classes, because those concepts have interdisciplinary relevance and thus are likely to be addressed on the MCAT, he adds. For instance, the MCAT usually includes questions about oxidation and reduction and the electron transport chain, because those two concepts come up in many science classes, he says.
Crowley says that premeds often give short shrift to the importance of the verbal questions on the MCAT and fail to adequately prepare for the critical analysis and reasoning skills section of the exam.
“One major issue I see is that STEM-focused students brush off or deprioritize the humanities and social science parts of the MCAT, often to their own detriment,” Crowley said via email. “When they get their MCAT scores back, the score distribution is lopsided as a result. […] Taking strong, challenging social science and writing classes and preparing ahead of time for these aspects of the MCAT can help buff up those sub scores, and in the process, help convince admissions committees that a biology or chemistry major is multifaceted and not one-dimensional, capable of understanding the psychosocial complexities of the patients they treat,” he said.
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Why the MCAT Is Harder Than a Typical College Exam originally appeared on usnews.com
