Hi guys,
There have been a lot of posts recently about mapping FLs from test prep companies to the real deal and people have been struggling with reconciling their scores during practice to what to expect on the real thing. In particular, it may be hard to decide whether to reschedule if you have no idea if your practice scores actually reflect your preparation for the real deal. To help a little with this, I looked at the SDN data on Kaplan FLs from users who took the MCAT 2015 and tried to see how they all performed on each exam. Using this data, I generated the attached plot of Kaplan FL scores vs. MCAT 2015 for people who took the exam in January 2016. In this sample, n ~ 40, so it's still pretty small, but you might find it useful. In preparing this graph, people who took multiple Kaplan FLs had each score reported and mapped to their actual MCAT score so it's basically a weighted average of the exams.
As you can see, there is a rough correlation (albeit not a particularly statistically strong one) between how well you do on the Kaplan FLs and how well you do on the actual thing. I would use it as a rough estimate of where you are in your studies.
This is intended to provide a rough measure of how you stand relative to others who have already taken the exam recently and it is not meant to predict your score in any way. Additionally, I would not recommend ceasing your practice after doing one FL and seeing that people who scored in a similar range as you all performed at your target score on the real thing. This is because most people took more than several FLs, from several companies including the AAMC ones, and so their actual score reflects the sum of their studying and progress over many FLs. I hope this will help guide your studies.
There have been a lot of posts recently about mapping FLs from test prep companies to the real deal and people have been struggling with reconciling their scores during practice to what to expect on the real thing. In particular, it may be hard to decide whether to reschedule if you have no idea if your practice scores actually reflect your preparation for the real deal. To help a little with this, I looked at the SDN data on Kaplan FLs from users who took the MCAT 2015 and tried to see how they all performed on each exam. Using this data, I generated the attached plot of Kaplan FL scores vs. MCAT 2015 for people who took the exam in January 2016. In this sample, n ~ 40, so it's still pretty small, but you might find it useful. In preparing this graph, people who took multiple Kaplan FLs had each score reported and mapped to their actual MCAT score so it's basically a weighted average of the exams.
As you can see, there is a rough correlation (albeit not a particularly statistically strong one) between how well you do on the Kaplan FLs and how well you do on the actual thing. I would use it as a rough estimate of where you are in your studies.
This is intended to provide a rough measure of how you stand relative to others who have already taken the exam recently and it is not meant to predict your score in any way. Additionally, I would not recommend ceasing your practice after doing one FL and seeing that people who scored in a similar range as you all performed at your target score on the real thing. This is because most people took more than several FLs, from several companies including the AAMC ones, and so their actual score reflects the sum of their studying and progress over many FLs. I hope this will help guide your studies.
Last edited:
