Anybody do awful VR on the 6/16/11 test

I also did, averaged 11-12 with a low of a 9, and got myself a 5 on the real one.
2pm'er

someone I also know averaged a 8 on hers, and got a 4 on the real one, 2pm'er also.

If they did make an error, they would have to redo the curve for everyone with our form. Sounds like too much work for them. They would never admit an error.

To be frank, the fact that test takers have no access to their tests is stupid as hell. The MCAT is probably the single biggest component in determining who gets into medical schools in the USA and Canada, yet literally no one knows what goes on behind closed doors. The only argument they have is that they recycle test questions, so we can't see them. Medical schools need to partner themselves with a more open organization. Period.

is this for 2pm or 2am?

What'd you score OP?

nola2016 said:

I also did, averaged 11-12 with a low of a 9, and got myself a 5 on the real one.
2pm'er

someone I also know averaged a 8 on hers, and got a 4 on the real one, 2pm'er also.

Click to expand...

thats crazy. Could possibly be. I got a 4 on mine and I tested in January. That or, these test as just ridiculously getting harder after each administration.

I'm calling them today too, still have hope that a large # of phone calls will make them worried enough to do something about i.t

I was averaging 10-12 and ended up with an 8. Not as drastic, but still much lower than I expected. Especially since I felt pretty confident about it.

so I called the AAMC today. the guy said that they HAVE TO look at each rescore case individually. They said they rescore the test by hand, which is a plus if we think there was a computer mistake. They also said they couldn't give me any data about whether or not any previous rescoring has resulted in a change in score. So for everyone who says AAMC has never changed a score, well, there is no way to get this info. I think it happened before, its just extremely rare since people trust the integrity of the test enough to not waste $55 to rescore. I am personally going to send in my rescore request today.

I averaged around a 10 on the practice tests but ended up getting a 7 on the 8am. To make matters worse, I did pretty well on both bio and phy sciences. So my advisor told me to apply but plan on a few schools being turned off right away. I think the risk is too high to retake it. I have no idea what I should do. I feel my resume is strong and the only real negative is going to that nice little 7 on verbal reasoning. Anyone have any ideas?

Im not saying there wasnt a possibility of a error in the 2PM but I took it and got a 9V.

I thought that section was hard, not bc of the paragraphs but because there were LOTS of subtle tricks in the questions/answers. It was very very easy to overlook something and pick the seemingly right answer and be wrong on that test, just saying. anybody who walked out of it feeling like the crushed likely made some careless mistakes...

I called and was told that multiple-choice section scores have been changed in the past upon rescore request.

Just like everyone else, I was averaging 10s on the AAMC VR practices, and I get stamped with a fat 4 on this test. Just like that, the test is essentially meaningless. I'm just as pissed as everyone else and given the sheer number of these problems there literally has to be something wrong.

EDIT: Just talked to the MCAT "help desk" and was told they can't launch an investigation of any rescoring problems unless it's a test center concern. So I'm submitting both the rescoring and test center concern forms (against Prometric).
Either way, it looks like some of us are spending the next month studying.
I suggest everyone submit both of these forms, as the bigger the problem is, the more obligated they are to investigate.
If you don't know what to include, see p28 and p30 of this: https://www.aamc.org/students/download/63060/data/mcatessentials.pdf

Best of luck to you all!

Does anybody know if the re-score could result in a lower score than the original score?

Yes, it can. But, I suspect it's far more rare.

Humm, I got a 10 on VR only once on a aamc(ranged from 6-10) and got a 10 on the 6/16 2pm. The VR has little to do with actual reading ability, its all about how to guess based on main idea as mcat sees it, and nervousness + over thinking definitely affects your guessing ability. That's probably what happened to many of you. They say there are 5 steps to grievance:

• 1. Denial and Isolation.
• 2. Anger.
• 3. Bargaining.
• 4. Depression.
• 5. Acceptance.

I think many of you a still on step 1(some may have progressed to step 2) eventually most will move on and start thinking about retaking, applying anyway or waiting a year.

I did fine on VR (I got an 11), but I'm just doubting the reliability of the test. Last year, I scored a PS = 11, BS = 8, VR = 9 and guessed on about 60% (I said 50% in another thread, but it was more like 60%) of the PS section, and about 70% of the BS section. This year, I felt like I aced it. I guessed on maybe 13-15 questions on the BS and PS combined and for the majority of those, I narrowed down to two answers. I scored a PS = 8, BS = 8, VR = 11. I honestly thought that the BS and PS went best for me and my score would be anywhere between 11 and 14 on both of those sections.

I'm in utter shock. It's not a matter of acceptance or denial. It's a matter of logical inconsistency.

That is pretty outrageous to go from ~10s to a 4 on the real thing. The ****ty thing about VR, though, is that certain passages can just be absolute killers.

I rocked (mostly) the VR on AAMC #4.. almost every question right on every passage but one. On that one passage I got all 6 questions wrong. Just takes a few passages you don't understand fully to totally throw you off your game.

I posted in the other thread but I'll throw it in here too. I had no confidence in the PS section at all and felt good about BS and was sure I had knocked verbal out of the water. I had no doubts about my verbal score. I thought I had gotten at most the last three questions I had to randomly guess on because of time wrong so I was thinking I would end up with about a 12. I was scoring 9-13's on practice tests for verbal and had worked on verbal prior to the test and I ended up with a damn 5 on verbal. I'm literally speechless

there is no way we all got an awful score! something went wrong or they did it on purpose so we can PAY to retake them. after all it is all a business

I don't know if I've ever seen a thread with people doing so badly in verbal on any specific test date.

However... There were some good scores out there. A colleague of mine received her PS-9, VR-11, BS-12 for a 32 composite for the 6/16/11 2pm test.

I don't know what to tell you guys. Maybe you had some test taking anxiety? (It is the MCAT after all)

I would suggest the re-score... but the AAMC generally doesn't mess up MCAT scores. Application stuff yes... not MCAT scores.

Good luck to all of you!

can someone post a link of the aamc rescoring form? I would look it up but i'm at work on my phone and I barely get any reception. =/

CodeBlu said:

I don't know if I've ever seen a thread with people doing so badly in verbal on any specific test date.

However... There were some good scores out there. A colleague of mine received her PS-9, VR-11, BS-12 for a 32 composite for the 6/16/11 2pm test.

I don't know what to tell you guys. Maybe you had some test taking anxiety? (It is the MCAT after all)

I would suggest the re-score... but the AAMC generally doesn't mess up MCAT scores. Application stuff yes... not MCAT scores.

Good luck to all of you!

Click to expand...

I agree, others had gotten good scores. I remember reading an MCAT writings score error (received score "X") which affected 420 out of 2400 test takers during a given administration, so it's possible there were multiple versions of the exam, whether it was different order of the passages or different passages.

nola2016 said:

can someone post a link of the aamc rescoring form? I would look it up but i'm at work on my phone and I barely get any reception. =/

Click to expand...

This can be found in the MCAT Essentials, page 28. I had my test rescored, but I'm skeptical because it's not like AAMC would reset the whole curve if they noticed I had an error. If there was an error, I really hope it can be resolved.

I got a 7 in verbal, but to be quite honest, I attribute it mostly to the curve. I just feel like even if you aced the section, the highest score would be a 12. I am guessing most people who did poorly (like me) were averaging around a 9 on VR (like me) and just had a slightly poor test (missed a few extra questions than usual), resulting in a really poor score due to the curve. I don't know. I am angry as well, but I just don't want to deal with this damn test anymore.

I'm going ahead and applying with my 29...

Wow, I've heard of venting but my goodness. I have gotten either an 8 or 9 in VR on all the practice tests I've taken and last year I took the 7/29/2010 MCAT and got a 6 in VR for a total score of 25M. I was devastated and over the past year I made sure to improve my PS and BS, but VR stayed consistently at 8 or 9. I took the 6/16 2pm exam this year with way more confidence and knowing what to expect and scored much better than last year. I believe if this test was the first for some of you, it may have been caused by test anxiety and you should go back, knowing what you know now, and own the test this time.

I am SOOOOOOOOO ANGRY at the world right now!

I feel like I just got my ***** kicked.... I got a 26M 10PS/7V/9BS

I was hoping for a 30+... I am going to wait until next year to apply while I study again and move to Florda while I figure out some things.

I used KAPLAN and thought I was ready to own the MCAT, did not happen!

Would you guys take it agian if you got a 26 or try to apply?

HydroBender said:

I am SOOOOOOOOO ANGRY at the world right now!

I feel like I just got my ***** kicked.... I got a 26M 10PS/7V/9BS

I was hoping for a 30+... I am going to wait until next year to apply while I study again and move to Florda while I figure out some things.

I used KAPLAN and thought I was ready to own the MCAT, did not happen!

Would you guys take it agian if you got a 26 or try to apply?

Click to expand...

Even though your chances are slight, it would still depend on your GPA and other areas of application. I say if you have a stellar GPA (+3.8), then you can give it a shot and apply and you might get accepted. However, I would recommend that you highly retake to be sure of acceptance somewhere.

I came to the United States in summer 2004 from Taiwan and have been going to school here ever since. I scored a 30 on the MCAT, PS13/ V6/ BS11 M. I am really worried that my writing as well as my verbal reasoning score is going to become the hurdle between me and many potential interview opportunities. Can any of you let me know to what extent will a 6 on the verbal affect my chances considering that I'm a foreigner and English is my second language? I did feel that the Verbal was tangible but my score just wasn't consistent with how I felt during the test, perhaps something did go wrong..

garrettni said:

I came to the United States in summer 2004 from Taiwan and have been going to school here ever since. I scored a 30 on the MCAT, PS13/ V6/ BS11 M. I am really worried that my writing as well as my verbal reasoning score is going to become the hurdle between me and many potential interview opportunities. Can any of you let me know to what extent will a 6 on the verbal affect my chances considering that I'm a foreigner and English is my second language? I did feel that the Verbal was tangible but my score just wasn't consistent with how I felt during the test, perhaps something did go wrong..

Click to expand...

A 6 in verbal will definitely hurt your chances, especially considering the strength of your score in the other sections. If I was in your situation I would retake.

how did so many people do badly on the verbal. I just don't get it. We sound like we did well in practice, but have completely opposite scores on the real thing. I feel like I was cheated.

premedk said:

Humm, I got a 10 on VR only once on a aamc(ranged from 6-10) and got a 10 on the 6/16 2pm. The VR has little to do with actual reading ability, its all about how to guess based on main idea as mcat sees it, and nervousness + over thinking definitely affects your guessing ability. That's probably what happened to many of you. They say there are 5 steps to grievance:

• 1. Denial and Isolation.
• 2. Anger.
• 3. Bargaining.
• 4. Depression.
• 5. Acceptance.

I think many of you a still on step 1(some may have progressed to step 2) eventually most will move on and start thinking about retaking, applying anyway or waiting a year.

Click to expand...

boy oh boy, you sure do know how to make friends, haha. I can only imagine how you would outline you're 5 step process when the time calls to confront a patient with bad news.

I won't post anything about my scores cause I did better on my actual test than any practice test (no I didn't take it 6/16). But I HIGHLY doubt there was a mass scoring error. There is not a "right" answer for verbal. A might be 70% right, B might be 65% right, etc. You could easily pick second best answer and feel confident about it.

Anyways, I wouldn't retake just for the sake of applying this cycle. Or just because you feel cheated. You guys don't seem in right mind set. And getting two bad scores would hurt any shot at applying. Once is a mistake but twice is umm....

Cheezewhiz said:

I was averaging 10-12 and ended up with an 8. Not as drastic, but still much lower than I expected. Especially since I felt pretty confident about it.

Click to expand...

this happened to me when I took my mcat last year. Although my verbal range was 10-11 on practice tests.

I took the 8am test on 6/16/11 and I'm quite disappointed with verbal.
Here are my recent AAMC scores:
AAMC 4: 10P 9V 12B - 31
AAMC 11: 10P 10V 10B - 30
AAMC 5: 12P 10V 11B - 33
AAMC 10: 10P 10V 11B - 31

I felt that the physical science section was really difficult and I couldn't finish so I expected a below average score. I thought the verbal section went well and the biological science section was average.

I ended up with a 9P 11B and a 7 on verbal!!

I am going to retake the test at the end of August and I am really not posting to complain about my scores. Looking ahead, I am just trying to figure out what went wrong with verbal and whether I should change my strategy (I took EK course and was following their strategy). I have gone through Kaplan, EK 101, and Princeton review hyper-learning verbal. I started at an 8 and was getting consistent 10s at the end of my preparation...but a 7?! I got through the entire verbal test on the real sitting with 2 minutes left to spare and I really felt like I understood all the passages since I still recall some of them.

I suppose outlier performances do happen and I am looking forward to another shot. Nonetheless, something smells fishy.

baylor1989 said:

boy oh boy, you sure do know how to make friends, haha. I can only imagine how you would outline you're 5 step process when the time calls to confront a patient with bad news.

Click to expand...

Way to enact Burnett's law.

Anyways, there does seem to be a disproportionate amount of people who made significantly lower verbal scores on this test date. I hate to give doubt that there was some error, but let's just speculate that maybe a certain version was keyed in wrong and this error only affected the people who had that version. If this were the case, wouldn't it be a red flag to the test makers that there was one version of the test that was disproportionately low, and that they should double check it for a mistake? I'd like to believe that they were doing something over the last month while grading our scores.

Also, there are a lot of people from both 8am and 2pm test that had these low scores. It seems unlikely that there would just happen to be some error that affected only certain people from these two separate administrations.

Of course, if I had made a 4 or 5 on verbal, I would damn sure be calling shenanigans on AAMC and requesting a rescore.

this is crazy. going from 10 to 4 or 5 is like 15 question swing.

HydroBender said:

I am SOOOOOOOOO ANGRY at the world right now!

I feel like I just got my ***** kicked.... I got a 26M 10PS/7V/9BS

I was hoping for a 30+... I am going to wait until next year to apply while I study again and move to Florda while I figure out some things.

I used KAPLAN and thought I was ready to own the MCAT, did not happen!

Would you guys take it agian if you got a 26 or try to apply?

Click to expand...

I got a 11BS/6VR/9PS on my 5/26 exam for a whooping 26! I went ahead and applied even though I am not expecting much. I have a little bit low GPA and pretty good EC's. I just applied because I had spent so much time on my app I felt like it would have been a huge waste to not apply.

I plan on spending the next year studying and READING pretty much anything I can get my hands on lol. I hope this works. I know I can get my sciences up but VR has always worried me. I was averaging a 9 on all my practice but got the 6 on T-Day.

Good luck to everyone for the second (my case third) round of studying!

I actually did half decent on the verbal section (11). It was above my average of 10 on the practice tests.

It sucks to hear there were so many issues. I hope you guys can get them worked out!

that is pretty brutal, but I'd put my money on nerves.

Caitlin0206 said:

I posted in the other thread but I'll throw it in here too. I had no confidence in the PS section at all and felt good about BS and was sure I had knocked verbal out of the water. I had no doubts about my verbal score. I thought I had gotten at most the last three questions I had to randomly guess on because of time wrong so I was thinking I would end up with about a 12. I was scoring 9-13's on practice tests for verbal and had worked on verbal prior to the test and I ended up with a damn 5 on verbal. I'm literally speechless

Click to expand...

That's the thing about VR.. you NEVER know if you did well or not. You can have a hunch that you did, but it's totally hit or miss (as you can see it was in your case). When 3 of the 4 answers are right.. and it comes down to the test creator's opinion on which is most right, you can see where the ambiguity between answers would come in and why you can't really predict scores on VR.

if they find an error in the VR section when you sent to rescore, do you get your money back that you spent for them to rescore??

Melomare17 said:

if they find an error in the VR section when you sent to rescore, do you get your money back that you spent for them to rescore??

Click to expand...

No, it's just a fee for the processing.

jacol3650 said:

No, it's just a fee for the processing.

Click to expand...

but it wasn't your fault they messed up, it also is not your fault you have to wait 4 weeks to get your scores back, hence delaying apps. so you shouldn't have to pay the money to get something right which should have been right from the beginning.

they do it on the SAT http://sat.collegeboard.org/scores/verify-sat-scores

Melomare17 said:

but it wasn't your fault they messed up, it also is not your fault you have to wait 4 weeks to get your scores back, hence delaying apps. so you shouldn't have to pay the money to get something right which should have been right from the beginning.

they do it on the SAT http://sat.collegeboard.org/scores/verify-sat-scores

Click to expand...

i'm not saying any part of AAMC policies are fair, but it is what it is. i would say it's well worth the fee if there is even a 5% chance those who submitted will actually be heard.

my girlfriend and I both took the 6/16 8a test. on aamc practice exams, we were both averaging about 10 on the VR. on the actual exam, however, i received a 7 and she a 6. and just now, i spoke with another guy in my postbacc who took the same test, and he said that he too averaged a 10 in practice but received a 7 on test day.

so then, i decide to log on to SDN in order to quell my fears of being duped by aamc. but instead i find an entire thread dedicated to the possibility of erroneous scoring.

i am anti-conspiracy theory. there are no ghosts. everything has a scientific explanation. aamc does not make errors grading mcats.

but wtf?

Most of the people who did fine on VR probably won't even be posting here. Be cautious before you get too alarmed.

Wow, I really feel for you guys, and it's making me nervous eventhough I haven't taken the test yet.

I think it's one thing to be scoring 10-11 on practice tests and then get a 7-8 on the real thing. But a 4 or 5?? I believe most premeds could take an AAMC verbal without ever having practiced and manage a 6. To drop so low from your practice scores, honestly, I'd probably hire an attorney and get on their case about investigating a potential error. I'd be angry if my score mysteriously dropped 60% below my other AAMC practice scores, especially after learning that it happened to others.

Hope it works out for you guys. Keep us updated.

I was intrigued enough by this thread to dig a little and it seems that the really good verbal scores from this date were afternoon testers.

There have certainly been test dates in the past where everyone I thought would do great on a certain section underperformed. No one who requested a regrade got anything for their $50 except the chance to agonize a little longer. The good news is that the people I kept in touch with who repeated ended up nailing the section the second time around.

I believe there must be some issue with curves from time-to-time, but the reality is that all you can really do is take the test again and kick its butt. Flukes happen in life. I also think from time to time scores are inflated, so like everything in life, the MCAT is a chance event. Hopefully next time the curve will err in your favor.