Anyone else doubt that med schools are going to weigh each section equally?

[NimbleNavigator]

I just find it hard to believe that a med school would weight a 132/127/127/126 the same as a 126/127/127/132. Both are 512's, but personally I think it would be a lot more impressive if someone got a perfect score in C/P than a perfect score in 132. Of course, I say this as someone who struggles with C/P and finds P/S much easier.

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[aldol16]

Does it matter how schools weigh the scores from the perspective of the MCAT taker? Even if a school explicitly says that they are gonna weigh C/P and B/BC heavily, you should still be studying hard for CARS and P/S simply because you are gonna be compared to other test-takers who score high in all sections. But I do agree that C/P and B/BC should be weighed more because P/S is really memorization-heavy and doesn't really test scientific reasoning as much as the other two science sections.

 

[Gurby]

But I do agree that C/P and B/BC should be weighed more because P/S is really memorization-heavy

Know what else is really memorization-heavy?

 

[aldol16]

Know what else is really memorization-heavy?

They are trying to get away from that though, as medicine becomes more data-driven. I don't remember the exact statistic, but some surprisingly small percentage of what you learn in your first year of medical school will still be true when you practice. So equipping students with analytical skills is way more useful - I guess medicine is coming around to how it's done in the sciences.

 

[Wolfpack93]

Find me someone who gets a 132 in the CARS section and I would be much more impressed with that than a 132 in any other section. Also, I do believe med schools weigh CARS/Verbal more heavily than other sections, and I've heard before that CARS scores correlate with higher Step 1 pass rates. But this is all information from other sources so take it with a grain of salt.

 

[7331poas]

They are trying to get away from that though, as medicine becomes more data-driven. I don't remember the exact statistic, but some surprisingly small percentage of what you learn in your first year of medical school will still be true when you practice. So equipping students with analytical skills is way more useful - I guess medicine is coming around to how it's done in the sciences.

At least your anatomy class will be true. So we are already at 20%

I don't think your logic holds up. We teach undergrad chemistry students about chemistry. So if major changes happen in the field, they can understand and adapt.

 

[KoalaT]

I'm sure they do but who cares. Do your best on every section regardless.

I would agree though that they probably take CARS the most serious, and if I had to guess, Pysch/Soc not nearly as serious (Let's be real. Half of it is common sense). I never took Psych/Soc in college, spent 1/4 the time studying it compared to other sections, and as of now its like my highest percentage consistently over 90% because I just BS (not biological sciences) my way through the questions with some common sense.

 

[aldol16]

At least your anatomy class will be true. So we are already at 20%

I don't think your logic holds up. We teach undergrad chemistry students about chemistry. So if major changes happen in the field, they can understand and adapt.

It was 50% instead of what I said. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC300793/

It's more akin to what we discuss in graduate chemistry seminars. We discuss material there that is always in a state of flux and so as grad students, we're taught a lot more about how to test hypotheses rather than raw material (i.e. growing a crystal, measuring KIE/isotopic perturbations, etc.). I guess in medical school you need both - the raw understanding but also the skills to analyze data. Very little of what we teach in undergrad chemistry will be disproven anytime soon. That's because you could go back thirty years and gen chem would have been taught the same way, with much of the same things we teach today. The classical organic syntheses have been known for a very long time - some for over a hundred years. In contrast, what we're taught in graduate courses is more relevant to the field today - akin to much of what is presumably learned in medical school. As such, many of these hypotheses are still being tested and re-made. That's all I was trying to say.

 

[7331poas]

It was 50% instead of what I said. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC300793/

It's more akin to what we discuss in graduate chemistry seminars. We discuss material there that is always in a state of flux and so as grad students, we're taught a lot more about how to test hypotheses rather than raw material (i.e. growing a crystal, measuring KIE/isotopic perturbations, etc.). I guess in medical school you need both - the raw understanding but also the skills to analyze data. Very little of what we teach in undergrad chemistry will be disproven anytime soon. That's because you could go back thirty years and gen chem would have been taught the same way, with much of the same things we teach today. The classical organic syntheses have been known for a very long time - some for over a hundred years. In contrast, what we're taught in graduate courses is more relevant to the field today - akin to much of what is presumably learned in medical school. As such, many of these hypotheses are still being tested and re-made. That's all I was trying to say.

So what you are saying is that the chemistry seminars are useless since that information will change? Maybe I am missing something. What exactly are you interested in medical schools changing about what they teach

 

[aldol16]

So what you are saying is that the chemistry seminars are useless since that information will change? Maybe I am missing something. What exactly are you interested in medical schools changing about what they teach

No, what I'm saying is that chemistry seminars are very useful because they teach skills that allow you to analyze data and take on new information quickly - in graduate seminars, at least. This is useful because the field is constantly in flux. In the undergraduate chemistry courses I teach (again, my experience is limited to my own undergraduate career and now, the courses that I teach as a grad student), there is very little analysis and they are more content-based. The department is more concerned with throwing information at undergraduates (akin to memorizing the rate law for an SN2 reaction, for example, or the mechanism of a Wolff-Kischner reduction) rather than emphasizing analysis (akin to going over what different experimentally-derived rate laws would mean - that is, what would be implied by an inverse first-order dependence on B in a multi-step reaction - or the principles of physical organic chemistry and what a KIE is).

Now, my original statement is that medical schools are beginning to come around to this perspective - specifically, how science is taught to us graduate students. I say they are coming around to this analysis-based perspective rather than content memorization because of the way the new MCAT is formatted. That is, instead of memorizing a ton of physics equations, it requires you only to memorize a few and to reason from there. It's also giving you a lot of data and asking you to interpret the data. This is prevalent in the biological sciences passages but the C/P passages are also tending towards that. In the future, the MCAT is tending even more towards those kinds of experimental passages, as one would encounter in the Section Bank.

So in sum, I am not saying that graduate seminars are useless because the material covered in them will change. Quite the contrary, actually. I'm saying that graduate seminars are very useful compared to undergraduate courses because the former emphasizes hypothesis-testing and how to analyze data as opposed to memorization of content. It's a difference of being at the forefront of the field where ideas are floating around and being tested and re-tested as compared to learning about where the field was 100 years ago.

 

[David513]

Not to revive an old thread (it's only about a month!), but the Biological Sciences (B/B) section seems to be the best predictor of performance in med school and on Step 1, as indicated in this meta-analysis on PubMed: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17198300
From the analysis: "the biological sciences subtest as the best predictor of medical school performance in the preclinical years (r = 0.32 95% CI, 0.21-0.42) and on the USMLE Step 1"

Therefore, I imagine many schools weigh the B/B section more heavily than other sections.