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a lot of people seem surprised they scored well, wondering conversely if any 520+ people knew coming out they did well (and not in the "trust your FL" sense, like you genuinely thought you aced it)
Didn't feel anything- I thought it was difficult, but not any more difficult than the AAMC FL exams. Honestly, I came out feeling just like I felt after the AAMC tests.
Kevin W, MCAT Tutor
Med School Tutors
Be very careful with this. It's a high stress exam, and most people leave it feeling like crap. Go on the reddit threads and see lots of posts from people who are glad they didn't void because they ended up doing way better than they thought. Of course, some people are surprised on the downside.Hi Kev,
So should I void if I feel like I messed up...? Serious question.
I felt really bad about P/S because I hadn't seen so much of the terminology before. I mainly ascribe that to having studied by exclusively using the Kaplan prep book, which apparently has/had lots of missing material. I think I just got lucky or the curve was generous to me somehow. I ended up getting a 131.
You should apply to med schoolI felt like I totally bombed it (526)
I felt like I totally bombed it (526), especially B/B, where I thought I'd tanked an entire passage. Ended up getting a 132 in B/B. Weird stuff.
The funny thing is that I had already been tutoring for the MCAT full-time for years and had taken it (albeit the old one) twice before (42 on both; I felt like crap both of those times too). So I spent almost every day buried in MCAT passages and was usually 100% confident that I'd aced them. But in the official test setting, it was different. I'd say that 90%+ of my tutoring students who got 520+ walked out of the test feeling like garbage too.
This happened to me too! I've always attributed it in part to the presence of field test questions. In fact, I think the feeling of "there was a bunch of weird stuff I haven't seen before" in any section is probably partially because the official test has field test Qs and the AAMC practice tests don't. This is also why the tendency of high scorers to mentally calculate their scores after every question ("I think I've only missed one so far, so I'm good...oh no, I probably missed another one...") is especially unproductive, because even if you're right about which questions you missed, they could've been exclusively field test questions and you could still get a perfect score on the section. (This applies less for the shortened 2020 test than it does otherwise, since the AAMC cut out most if not all of the field test Qs for those administrations.)
I was considering it for a long time! That's why I wanted to get a "new MCAT" score—at the time, my most recent score was about to be too old to apply to certain schools.are you a full time tutor and take the MCAT for experience ? why dont you want to go to medical school ?