anyone do crappy on the mcat but then rock the boards?

[realruby2000]

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they say mcat scores correlate well with board performance. Anyone do a "not so good job" on the mcat but scored competative on the boards?... and i know this might sound kinda dumb but, the mcat verbal killed my mcat score...is there anything similar at all to the verbal section on the USMLE?

thanks

 

[dwstranger]

US med schools use the rationale that performance on the MCAT is an indication of how one will perform on the USMLE when they reject someone who has low MCAT scores. I'm here to say that one does not necessarily predict the other. I ended up going to school in Mexico because of rejections by US schools. I took Step 1 last summer and did fine... better than "just passing" -- but not as well as my classmate who got a 231... So you may not get into a US school with crappy MCATs, but you can still score high enough on the USMLE to get a competitive residency.

As far as verbal -- it's definitely written to weed out non-English speakers, given that it's a timed test and you have to have a certain level of vocabulary to get through it. But there's no verbal section, per se. It's all science, which is probably what saved my butt...

 

[dwstranger]

US med schools use the rationale that performance on the MCAT is an indication of how one will perfomr on the USMLE when they reject someone who has low MCAT scores. I'm here to say that one does not necessarily predict the other. I ended up going to school in Mexico because of rejections by US schools. I took Step 1 last summer and did fine... better than "just passing" -- but not as well as my classmate who got a 231... So you may not get into a US school with crappy MCATs, but you can still score high enough on the USMLE to get a competitive residency.

As far as verbal -- it's definitely written to weed out non-English speakers, given that it's a timed test and you have to have a certain level of vocabulary to get through it. But there's no verbal section , per se. It's all science, which is probably what saved my butt...

 

[GTMD2Bee]

I'm not sure how much of a correlation there is between the MCAT and the boards, but I would not underestimate the importance of the verbal section. Step 2 has some notoriously long passages, and is far more time consuming I thought. I was finished with Step 1 by noon. Step 2 took me until almost 5pm, granted I used my breaks, but you need it because most of the sections require all of your time. I can easily see how anyone who had difficulty reading and comprehending the verbal passages on the MCAT would have trouble with Step 2.