When to retake? June or July?

[KevinGnapoor]

Hi guys,

I took the April 11 test, and I'm not sure how I did. I want to register for a retake but I'm not sure which date to choose. Unfortunately a lot of the late May / mid June dates are gone. There are some test dates available in mid May, but I think those are too early. There's one spot open for June 5th, and the next available date is July 2nd. I don't know which one to choose, given that I'm starting a new job position in mid May. I'm also worried that the July 2nd date is too late because my gpa is quite low: gpa is 3.5 and my sgpa is 3.3.

Please let me know what you would do in my position. Thank you!!

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[johnnytest]

Hey,

I also took the april 11th mcat and I'm in the same boat as you. My main concern was that if I re-take in July, medical schools will not see my application until August. However, after doing some searching on SDN, I found out that many people have taken their mcats in July and even August but they submitted their application in early June and got the verification process going as well as received secondaries from some schools. Once, their mcat score came in they got notified for interviews fairly quickly.

In your case, it comes down to realizing why you may not have done as well as you wanted and improving on that. Since you are taking it again, you want to do the best you can. Also, keep in mind if you register for june 5th and you find out you did well on your april 11th mcat, you can't get the $135 refund.
If you feel you can kill the june 5th mcat then that would be a good date assuming you submit your primary in early june. But, you don't want to risk not doing well on the june 5th mcat for the sake of applying early. Finally, in retrospect, July MCATs are still early considering many applicants will take the august and september mcats and still apply this cycle.

I decided to register for july 2nd because I feel I need the extra time and I know I will submit my primary by early June.
Hope I was of some help. Best of luck.

 

[KevinGnapoor]

Thank you for the solid advice!

I looked through previous threads on taking the july mcat, but it seemed like those people had solid cgpa and sgpa, which I clearly don't. So for me applying early is super important. I decided to go with the June 5th MCAT because I feel like if I did the July 2nd, I would slow down and get lazy. I also think a lot of my problems were more test taking skills, and not so much content so I feel like in the 8 weeks left, I can do a lot more practice passages and FLs.

Good luck on your July 2nd MCAT!