You guys have got me thinking,
It's probably more than a little bit of sour grapes (my verbal reasoning score finishes with a limp among my MCAT scores), but I take a little bit of issue with the way the VR test is structured. Let me survey the big gripes I have about it:
1. It's shorter than the other two sections, therefore already harder to evaluate with statistical methods (the methods by which AMCAS assigns us scores)
2. It assigns concrete values(because as we know, there's always a right answer!)to abstract points, which adds another blurry spot. For example, I had questions marked incorrect on a practice passage closely aligned to my field of research because of a slight disagreement with word choice. Since I can't remember the questions on the actual test day, I can't prove anything, but I think it's still possible during the Main Event.
3. As I recall, the average raw score tends to be higher as a percentage of questions asked, when compared to PS and BS. Thus if you want to score well (which every single one of us does), there's a narrower range of raw scores in which to do so.
4. (All opinion) From my experience, the materials published on this section by AMCAS and the greedy review corporations least reflect the test day materials.
Based on the fact that they can't even evaluate the highest scores on the test with any relevance (they just group them together as 13-15), it seems to me that they're going on very high margins of error when they seperate the groups of raw scores into scaled values. And unlike a test in a class of say 100, the graders won't see clusters of peaks in a test thousands of people are taking.
This, taken with the fact that the test is normalized based on a raw score, caused a huge problem for me. During the test, I hit a rough patch with one passage (god knows which, I took it in August 2000) and I knew right then that my score was going to be at least a point, probably two, lower than either of my other scores, because it can't be more than four or five (65/13=5) right/wrong answers to put you into another scaled score. And while my score was not bad, it was frustrating to know that it was such a miniscule thing as one passage that didn't click on the first two reads.
Now I know it's nitpicking... but this is a test I could really only commit to once, and it for such a big hurdle it seems pretty arbitrary in retrospect.
I'm not saying people should get all worked up about it, of course you've got to play it cool on test day, but I always caution people to be wary of this devious little section.
your thoughts?