Not evading but I don't appreciate it when I bring up legitimate points and some of the people here resort to personal attacks. I don't recall going after individual people in any of my posts to prove a point.
No one is attacking you personally. No one knows you personally.
To get back to the discussion on MCAT's, any reasonable, unbiased person would tell you that an MCAT score can be heavily modified with prep courses as well as the timing of the test so how exactly do you compare one person's experience to another if one person had more access to more preparation? I don't know if you've ever seen that but I have seen it myself.
Prep courses, it can be argued, are teaching those who can be taught. If one improves their score, that is a demonstration that they have somehow improved their knowledge or how they process knowledge already there. When you take the tests (and I've taken them), they are structured to not only test knowledge, but also reasoning. They are also weight-scored, meaning that you actually get
more points taken off if you pick a completely wrong answer and/or guess (which becomes obvious over complex analysis of the entire test as patterns emerge for an individual test taker). These tests are extremely complex and not as simply as "right or wrong" when scored. They are also validated across the population of test takers.
So, yes, a prep course will improve scores for those in which scores can be improved (i.e., usually a knowledge deficit). They also teach test-taking strategy which, for those who also have an "organizational" cognitive problem that can also be overcome with instruction, correlates well with the way that information is expected to be processed and regurgitated in the medical profession.
Therefore, the fact that some people can improve their scores with prep courses does not undermine the validity of the test as it correlates with individual performance (as has been studied, and produced for you above). Many people take prep courses and still subsequently do terribly on the tests, too.
Bottom line is you will have people that do well on the MCAT and fail the boards and you will have people that do poorly on the MCAT but can do well in medical school, take the boards, and then succeed.
Yes. You cannot argue with this statement. However, it is a vacuous truth. Past performance is clearly correlated with individual future performance when studied and analyzed (see above).
When you guys put up all that crap about stats, the problem I have with that, especially on a Caribbean forum, is that you are sending the message to some kid that if their MCAT is not good, then they should give up on becoming a doctor when that is dumbest advice you can give a pre-med. The discussion should instead be "how to get into which school with which MCAT score."
Well, "all that crap about stats" forms the basis of evidenced-based medicine. It is something you should endeavor to understand, learn how to interpret, learn how to
intelligently critique, and used to defend your decisions. It is not something to dismiss simply because your own personal empiric observations, rife with their own bias, don't agree with them.
That's the point many of us are trying to make on this thread.
Once you are in medical school, that MCAT score does not matter at all.
With all due respect, I think this is the point that you continue to miss.
The MCAT score is predictive on how you will do on standardized tests, and can be extrapolated
in general with how you will do in school
and in medicine. People who struggle with standardized tests, for
whatever reason, will have lifelong challenges in this profession. It may ultimately have little correlation on an
individual level, but it is predictive on a
pooled level. No one can know exactly what will happen to a single person, but law of averages suggests exactly the opposite of what you're saying.
Again, I have been warning students for years on this forum that if, for whatever reason, they struggle with standardized tests, they should diligently work on improving this skill... or reconsider the profession altogether. You simply cannot advance your career if this is a continuous problem. I, too, have seen this too many times to count. And, that observation is backed-up and validated with data.
-Skip
