Can I Have Your Honest Opinion??

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I am considering a prep class. I was scoring low on the FL AAMC. I did have some 25s and a 30 though

Hindsight is 20/20, but since you don't seem to have acknowledged it, and nobody else is saying it, I'll say it:

You should have come here and made this thread BEFORE taking the real test. You've been an active SDN member for over a year. You should have known better. This is such a common theme on here - having been on the site for a year, you should know that taking the MCAT when you're doing poorly on the practice exams is highly correlated with doing poorly on the actual exam.

It doesn't sound like you have a standardized testing issue to me, it sounds like you've been in denial or have trouble with self-assessment. You SHOULD HAVE KNOWN you were going to do poorly, because you took the practice exams and got poor scores. This should have been an indication that something was going wrong with your preparation. But instead of postponing the test and correcting the problem, you just crossed your fingers and hoped for the best because you got a 30 on one practice test and that's pretty good.

I think this thread shows a disconnect with reality:
http://forums.studentdoctor.net/threads/do-lor.1097030/
You were "scoring low... did have some 25's and a 30". So your practice test average was very low, but you were basically assuming you'd get a 27-30. I think the root of your problem might be that you are unable to assess yourself honestly/accurately. You should have known that your preparation wasn't going well, and you should have adjusted your strategy accordingly. It appears that that didn't happen.


In another thread you say this:
I've studied all summer but have put off the practice testso_O
No es bueno. Again hindsight, but you should have taken a practice test early on so you could judge whether or not your studying was effective. Clearly your studying was not effective, but you didn't find out until it was close to your test date and you felt committed to taking it and afraid of waiting another year to apply.

On a side note just to kick you while you're down, you also applied very late for MD, especially considering you knew that you would almost certainly have a low score compared to MD averages.


All is not lost, however, so stop feeling defeated. You still have a strong enough app otherwise, and a 28+ probably gets you into a lot of DO schools(?). You need to not screw it up next time, though - another crappy score and you're probably toast. No pressure.

I don't think you can throw your hands up, say you're bad at standardized tests and blame it on ADHD just yet. Your GPA shows that you are pretty smart and that you can do well on a test. You just made some horrible mistakes in your approach to the MCAT (and med school application in general). You need to go back and figure out what isn't working, fix it, and then not retake the MCAT until you can be pretty sure you'll be able to score a few points higher than what you would be happy with. IE you need to honestly and accurately assess your performance next time, and not say "my average is a 22 but those last few tests were really hard and unfair, I'm sure the real thing will go much better."

It's possible that you do have some issue that will prevent you from doing well on a test like this, I don't know, I'm not a doctor. However, what concerns me most is that you made some really bad decisions - you should not have taken the test given the overwhelming evidence that you would get a score exactly like the one you got. You either subconsciously turned a blind eye to this evidence, willfully ignored it, or didn't grasp the severity of it.

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Standardized test taking is a skill, just like riding a bike or throwing a curve ball. Go seek out your school's learning or education center for help with test taking.

I believe that you are indeed very smart, but your ADHD is still preventing you from achieving your very best. If you want to be a doctor, you're going to have to find a way to fix this. There accommodations for people with learning disabilities that can help you, like longer test times, or being in a quite room by yourself. Your LD will have to be documented by the right people, like clinicians.



I'm going to take a major risk and be really vulnerable with you guys (SDN community) and spill my academic/intellectual story hoping that I can get some insight or advice. I recently received my MCAT scores and did terrible. My dream has been to be a doctor. I'm feeling really defeated and need some help.
So here is my story.....ever since I started grade school I have been that kid that is really smart in some area and REALLY struggled in other areas. I was even put into a "transition" grade between kindergarten and 1st grade. Later I was diagnosed with ADHD and put on medication. During that time I had a childhood IQ test and was supposedly 120. I continued to struggle in classes like math and English yet excelled in the sciences. I even practically failed high school algebra twice in high school:eek:. I took the SAT and scored a terrible 900!
After high school I didn't really know what I wanted to do and needed to mature more and figure life out. I went into surgical technology through a community college. Through that job/career I discovered my passion for medicine. I absolutely love my job and have just as much enthusiasm and zeal for the field as any. So, here is the problem.
I enrolled in university classes and am about to graduate with a 3.8GPA in Human Life Sciences. I took all the prereqs for medical school and did really well. I got A's in physics, organic, chemistry...etc. I took the MCAT and received a 22:(.
So, here is the reason for my rant. Am I just kidding myself into thinking I'm graduate level material??? I took an assessment test for the GRE and it estimated around a 280:(. Now grant it I have not studied for the GRE, but still.....
When I looked up how IQ correlates to SAT/GRE it puts my IQ at around 93-100:(:(:(!
Now I feel like I have a higher IQ than that. I have taken really hard undergraduate level classes and have a GPA of 3.8. I TA biology and my professor told me that I was by far the best TA he has ever had. I actually teach a class prior to each lecture to help the students and do really well. People tell me that I'm really smart and talented. I work with surgeons and they all think that I am capable, yet my standardized testing abilities say otherwise.
I guess I'm really worried that I'm going to have this BS in biology and not be able to go on to med school/PA school/graduate school. Everything about medicine and graduate school is based on these standardized tests!!

Sorry for the rant....but I could really use some advice! Thank you so much for reading

If anybody has a similar story and how they over came that would be really helpful
 
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Hindsight is 20/20, but since you don't seem to have acknowledged it, and nobody else is saying it, I'll say it:

You should have come here and made this thread BEFORE taking the real test. You've been an active SDN member for over a year. You should have known better. This is such a common theme on here - having been on the site for a year, you should know that taking the MCAT when you're doing poorly on the practice exams is highly correlated with doing poorly on the actual exam.

It doesn't sound like you have a standardized testing issue to me, it sounds like you've been in denial or have trouble with self-assessment. You SHOULD HAVE KNOWN you were going to do poorly, because you took the practice exams and got poor scores. This should have been an indication that something was going wrong with your preparation. But instead of postponing the test and correcting the problem, you just crossed your fingers and hoped for the best because you got a 30 on one practice test and that's pretty good.

I think this thread shows a disconnect with reality:
http://forums.studentdoctor.net/threads/do-lor.1097030/
You were "scoring low... did have some 25's and a 30". So your practice test average was very low, but you were basically assuming you'd get a 27-30. I think the root of your problem might be that you are unable to assess yourself honestly/accurately. You should have known that your preparation wasn't going well, and you should have adjusted your strategy accordingly. It appears that that didn't happen.


In another thread you say this:

No es bueno. Again hindsight, but you should have taken a practice test early on so you could judge whether or not your studying was effective. Clearly your studying was not effective, but you didn't find out until it was close to your test date and you felt committed to taking it and afraid of waiting another year to apply.

On a side note just to kick you while you're down, you also applied very late for MD, especially considering you knew that you would almost certainly have a low score compared to MD averages.


All is not lost, however, so stop feeling defeated. You still have a strong enough app otherwise, and a 28+ probably gets you into a lot of DO schools(?). You need to not screw it up next time, though - another crappy score and you're probably toast. No pressure.

I don't think you can throw your hands up, say you're bad at standardized tests and blame it on ADHD just yet. Your GPA shows that you are pretty smart and that you can do well on a test. You just made some horrible mistakes in your approach to the MCAT (and med school application in general). You need to go back and figure out what isn't working, fix it, and then not retake the MCAT until you can be pretty sure you'll be able to score a few points higher than what you would be happy with. IE you need to honestly and accurately assess your performance next time, and not say "my average is a 22 but those last few tests were really hard and unfair, I'm sure the real thing will go much better."

It's possible that you do have some issue that will prevent you from doing well on a test like this, I don't know, I'm not a doctor. However, what concerns me most is that you made some really bad decisions - you should not have taken the test given the overwhelming evidence that you would get a score exactly like the one you got. You either subconsciously turned a blind eye to this evidence, willfully ignored it, or didn't grasp the severity of it.
Well, I did ask for an honest opinion didn't I.....
 
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TBH, I don't buy this whole ADHD/text-anxiety bit. How did you get a 3.8 - I assume you took tests? Were the tests just easy/non-comprehensive/with detailed outlines?
 
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Well, I did ask for an honest opinion didn't I.....

I think you still have a great chance at getting in somewhere (next cycle), you just have some issues to work through.
 
TBH, I don't buy this whole ADHD/text-anxiety bit. How did you get a 3.8 - I assume you took tests? Were the tests just easy/non-comprehensive/with detailed outlines?
I have always done well on in class exams......SAT/GRE/MCAT not so much........I go to IU not a particularly easy school
 
I have always done well on in class exams......SAT/GRE/MCAT not so much........I go to IU not a particularly easy school
Why do you think you have such a drastic difference in performance?
 
Something I'm going to have to seek out professional help with in figuring out.
Definitely do that and really study before retaking the MCAT. 1 low MCAT is salvageable. With 2, you show that the first score wasn't an outlier. Best of luck!
 
You seem like you have a firm grasp of the content, but your scores, especially from the AAMC FL, would suggest otherwise. Why did you get questions wrong on your practice test? Was it because you didn't know the material?
 
Something I'm going to have to seek out professional help with in figuring out.

Maybe I'm being too dimissive. Do you feel differently when taking standardized tests vs. your coursework in college? Do you have some legitimate psychological barrier to standardized tests? You need to figure out the difference between your performance on the MCAT vs. other tests you've taken in college. Is the material much harder than what you saw in your pre-med courses?

TBH I'm actually shocked that some who scored a 900 on the SATs has a 3.8 gpa. And in turn that 3.8 GPA scored a 22 on the MCAT. I'm the other way around - I had near perfect SATs but struggle to maintain my 3.6.
 
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You seem like you have a firm grasp of the content, but your scores, especially from the AAMC FL, would suggest otherwise. Why did you get questions wrong on your practice test? Was it because you didn't know the material?
yeah I'll be honest I had questions that I just simply didn't know.....But when going back over the test answers I realized there were plenty that I just simply didn't get during the test that looking back I should have. Whether thats because of silly mistakes or a learning disability I've been trying to figure out. I usually had enough silly errors that many times I would go from a 22 to a 26 if I would have not made those mistakes
 
Maybe I'm being too dimissive. Do you feel differently when taking standardized tests vs. your coursework in college? Do you have some legitimate psychological barrier to standardized tests? You need to figure out the difference between your performance on the MCAT vs. other tests you've taken in college. Is the material much harder than what you saw in your pre-med courses?

TBH I'm actually shocked that some who scored a 900 on the SATs has a 3.8 gpa. And in turn that 3.8 GPA scored a 22 on the MCAT. I'm the other way around - I had a near perfect SATs but struggle to maintain by 3.6.
Yeah seriously, I have a 3.8 GPA at my university (Indiana University-east). I felt like the MCAT was a little harder with physics and organic chemistry. My classes in school, though I felt, prepared me well, in the sense that there was never a concept/topic I wasn't at least familiar with. (if that makes sense) I'm not saying that my classes are as hard as MIT, but they followed the same syllabus as IU-bloomington.

I've been told a lot of the times they've been the same tests from IU-Bloomington as well

BTW I'm shocked too, a 900 on SAT is bad and I consider myself a bit of a success story.
 
Hey man, for what it's worth, I had a 3.67 cGPA / 3.48 sGPA and made a 28 on the MCAT. This really discouraged me because I went to an undergrad in a state with fantastic, very competitive medical schools (not CA). I honestly reconsidered medical school and even started studying the GRE for PA school. Being a PA, for me, wasn't worth it. I wanted to be a damn oncologist. So I took a whole summer to practice 6 hours/day for the MCAT starting in May. In August, I took the MCAT again and made a 36.

If I had come here before retaking the MCAT, many would have told me that I should just go DO or an SMP and maybe reapply in a year or two to some state schools and depend on DO schools. I applied to 15 schools. Of those, I received 5 II's. One from John's Hopkins and another from Stanford. I was waitlisted from Stanford, rejected from JHUSOM, and the third school didn't notify me until May 15th that I was rejected. The last two, following the rejection from JHUSOM, gave me a spot in their medical school. A few weeks after that, I found out I received my HPSP scholarship with the Navy.

Don't let numbers discourage you. If you fight hard enough, that spot in medical school can be yours. The only way you won't get in is if you quit now.

P.S. IQ has nothing to do with how smart you are. I have an IQ of 119, yet I'm in medical school...
 
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You sound like a really bright guy with specific learning disabilities. People tend to assume that they're mutually-exclusive (high intelligence & LDs) but really they're not at all, and the blow to the self-esteem is considerable. (As you know.)

Sounds like you're still in college? If so, there should be a place you can go for counseling and/or testing. You may need to be very tenacious to find it, because with your GPA, you'll get a lot of "You don't need this!" feedback, and you truly do. If your school won't test you, there is private testing available if you've got the money to have it done (Private psycho-educational testing generally runs $1,000-$2,500). You're looking for highly specific tests that will help reveal where exactly you struggle and why that is. This kind of testing and the resulting documentation will help you get the testing accommodations you may need and legitimately qualify for. ADHD is one possibility, but it's only one of them. Also look at dyslexia, non-verbal learning disability, processing speed disorders and many, many others.

You're only a few MCAT points away from DO-zone, so please keep trying.
 
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I just want to re-emphasize, since nobody else is pointing this out, that even if you do have a disability of some sort, there were still many things under your control that you did wrong. You don't get to throw up your hands and say "woe is me" yet, IMO. Go ahead and be seen by learning specialists and see if you can learn something about yourself, but when you start preparing for the MCAT again you CANNOT make the same mistakes you made the first time.
 
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