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:
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.I've studied all summer but have put off the practice tests
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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