New SDN MCAT Project

Its sounds great except you have to develop some mechanism that enforces rigorous quality control. If 3/5 questions are poorly written/too easy/just plain incorrect, people will soon lose interest. Someone has to check through all of them, and I don't think that can just be other SDNers.

On a more serious concern, how will you ensure that the practice questions havent been pilfered completely or in part from commercial sources? There are literally thousands of questions from at least a half dozen qualified companies. Whos going to do the checking? Again, I don't know if other SDNers are qualified to do so.

This would be good, except that I tend to think with all the materials available, its better to just try to strike a deal with TPR and Kaplan that would allow you to try to administer a free MCAT diag a year. And also which will allow you an MCAT bank with people's old books and study aids. However, you would have to make sure there is no legality issues in doing so.

What you may be able to do, at least with TPR and Kaplan, is get a contract going.

Our premed AMSA created a contract with them that would allow them to auction off 3 courses. Meaning that 3 people would get it for a reduced price, then the actual course price. They were also allowed to keep a much older version in what we had as our PAMSA bank, where we kept resources. They also had 2 tests, one for each semester that we could administer through them as a fundraiser. I know none of this is free. However, it is a way to get it for a slightly reduced price and still expose people to the test. It worked out pretty well at our school. I think you should look into it.

Sounds great. It definitely needs a rating system, though to ensure quality. I think a simple "remove this question" type form is not enough, as rating them would allow for differentiating between good, MCAT-style questions versus simplistic strictly-factual practice questions. Do you have programming experience or are you looking to do this from commercially-available software?
Ari

Again, I think its a great idea, in theory, and all other reservations aside, I think you may be overestimating the ability of pre-meds and other nominally qualified individuals to come up with good test questions. Even commercial prep companies have a hard time coming up with good questions, having employed people who are highly trained in doing just that. And practicing with questions that are not very representative of the logic required by the MCAT might even be detrimental. Reviewers may spot most of the bad ones but I think you will find that 90+% of the questions wont be worthwhile--it may take years to accumulate enough questions to make this project a significant portion of anyones review. Then again, every idea has to start somewhere!

Instead of designing and implementing the software to save question submissions to a database, ranking systems and web applets to display the questions, et you may want to see how many good questions (error-free/non-copyright infringing/7+ on a scale of 1-10) you get. You can then decide whether to proceed based on the number of quality submissions.

junebuguf said:

Again, I think its a great idea, in theory, and all other reservations aside, I think you may be overestimating the ability of pre-meds and other nominally qualified individuals to come up with good test questions. Even commercial prep companies have a hard time coming up with good questions, having employed people who are highly trained in doing just that. And practicing with questions that are not very representative of the logic required by the MCAT might even be detrimental. Reviewers may spot most of the bad ones but I think you will find that 90+% of the questions wont be worthwhile--it may take years to accumulate enough questions to make this project a significant portion of anyones review. Then again, every idea has to start somewhere!

Instead of designing and implementing the software to save question submissions to a database, ranking systems and web applets to display the questions, et you may want to see how many good questions (error-free/non-copyright infringing/7+ on a scale of 1-10) you get. You can then decide whether to proceed based on the number of quality submissions.

Click to expand...

I totally agree with the first part of what you said, that this is a good idea in theory. I, however, do not see it working out. I think it is much better to try to work with different test prep companies that are trained in this sort of thing to create some sort of contract. That is more constructive. In the meanwhile, there are some tests that these companies give that are free, like princeton review's free online test. So there are some you can collect. Try to work a deal with these commercial companies. I don't think realistically any premed can write a good example of MCAT questions and what not. This is my constant concern amongst MCAT material.

Lee A Burnett said:

is there a need for a "How to succeed on the MCAT" guide, designed in a Wiki format, which allows users to add and update information as needed? Or a FAQ repository of similar information?

Click to expand...

i like this idea a lot...and since the medium itself implies that subjective (and perhaps not over-qualified) premeds are submitting advice/recommendations, it won't carry the same burden as an mcat question bank.

I like this idea. As with the other posters, I can't quite see it being a successful testbank, however it would serve a few useful purposes. The questions would likely be written by those who are studying for the MCAT which would be a great study tool - if you can create a question about something and figure out what's important on a topic, you're on your way to really understanding it. I like the ranking idea but also maybe there could be a thread attached to each and that way a discussion could be created about each one. Having people debate points of the question would also help learning.

Question: would people be able to add questions from their undergrad classes if they seemed appropriate? This might help a lot as they'd probably be good questions and they probably wouldn't be copyrighted (as long as the professors didn't have issues with it).

There may be some problems, but I think it's a good idea

Another consideration is copyright. Most Wikis are set to automatically Creative Commons license any works submitted. This would be a very good idea, and might even get the test companies on your side enough to help you out with some starter questions.

--Ari

i assume that these questions would be geared towards the independent questions (non-passage) otherwise we are gonna have pre-meds writing passages and that doesnt seem plausible. but a questionbank for concepts sounds great.

I think a guide would be useful. You could start with a few SDNers who really did well and have a lot of experience teaching the MCAT to write a general overview. Then, provide subsections dealing with each topic (angular momentum, genetics, acid-base titrations, et) and allow everyone in the SDN community to share their opinion on how these areas are tested and what concepts are and are not important within each. It would also allow each batch of test-takers to post (in a very broad, unidentifiable, way) how a particular MCAT administration chose to present a topic. For instance, this past April, an acid-base titration question was asked dealing with a strong acid titrating a weak polyprotic base, which produced a titration curve that was rather odd looking considering most books teach the concept with a strong base titrating a weak acid. Point being, without going into any specifics, you can reveal a lot of detail about the nature of the questions on the actual test, which would be immensely useful.

Lee A Burnett said:

I'm planning a new project for premed students studying for the MCAT. It will be an MCAT mock question database.

This database will be different from usual online question banks; these questions will be written by fellow students studying for the MCAT.

As a method for studying material, students will create mock questions which will be saved to the database. Students will also be able to take mock tests based on these questions.

To help ensure quality of questions, students taking the mock questions can challenge questions that may be inappropriate or wrong.

I'd like to hear your suggestions or questions about this project.

Click to expand...

Sounds good in theory however, we are reinventing the wheel. As one person pointed out, definitions, formulas can be learned easily. As far as mock questions are concerned, as you can imagine, most will be asking questions from their own study guides, etc, which does not really help. If you had an official question bank of old MCAT questions, not taken from someones memory, with reliable answers, that would be well worth the effort. I personally would rather take a course or buy a book rather than read peer written questions (especially for the PS section) simply for accuracys sake.

The MCAT prep wiki sounds like a great idea, but one concern is the tendency for some posters on sdn (including and perhaps especially me) to be long-winded. The text of this guide may become unmanageably long as a result. People also tend to be quite argumentative, so I would suggest having moderators for the guide just as we have moderators for the forum. These people would be responsible for keeping arguments, off-topic material, and rude or offensive material out of the guide. One of the reasons Wikipedia works is that many of the people who write articles for it have a "subscription" to the article so that they get an email every time a change is made. MIT did a study that showed that a profanity randomly inserted into a Wikipedia article will be removed in 1.7 minutes, on average. So somebody has to be policing this thing.

I agree with the above posters that the question bank is probably not feasible. I think junebuguf best expressed the potential problems. In particular, the difficulty in designing test questions shouldn't be overlooked. If it were easy, TPR and Kaplan questions would be more similar to the actual MCAT (which we all know they aren't really).