Discouraged about terrible score

[oakland24]

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Hello, I am not sure what to do regarding my PCAT score. I just started my sophomore year of college but I am junior status credit wise; therefore, I thought I could take the PCAT and do okay.I took the PCAT (about a week ago) and when they printed out my score against the 'norm' my composite score was 8 percentile. I was so shocked and disappointed-- I thought I would do MUCH better. I took a few practice tests and my practice tests categorized me within the 59-79%. I'm hoping that my official test score will be different but I was told the predicted score is fairly accurate. I am very concerned and scared considering I did SO poorly! What advice do you have for me? I'm incredibly discouraged. Of course, I have time to take it again and do better but it seems like such a far jump from 8% to a good score. My GPA is about a 3.8 and my science GPA is about a 3.4. I heard some pharmacy schools do not require the PCAT so that might be an option. I would love to go to Wayne State University in Michigan for pharmacy school though. I am so discouraged that I'm thinking about maybe changing careers because I work hard in school but it didn't pay off while testing. Thank you for your time.

God Bless

 

[smileyman22336]

Do not give up. I also got a first score that was not all that great the first time and the second time I did way better. Keep your head up, and still apply. Then retake the test again for January or July of next year and continue your education in whatever field you choose. If you get in this cycle great, if not, apply for the next one.

 

[oakland24]

Thank you smileyman22336. I wasn't expecting to do great since haven't taken any orgo or college math yet. But I really didn't expect to do that bad! I have finished all my bio and inorganic chem classes though. The QA was a lot harder than I imagined so I'm going to probably take the PCAT next school year after I have taken orgo, precalc, and calc.

 

[kcwang]

Dude you got time. Dont worry about it, its not the end of the world. There is a post from a guy who got 99% composite, follow his advice. You should be able to get around 80% composite. PCAT is not that hard, they always use same type of questions. You can skip and guess all the organic questions on pcat and still get 70% on Chem.

For math, half of the questions are basically "just do the calculations". You just need to practice a lot of calculation questions. Math questions that look hard and difficult (like the one with big diagram and lots of words)? Skip them first! Finish the rest of the easy straghitforward questions, then go back to them.
For Bio? Refer to the 99% post.
Verbal and RC are my weak areas, so I won't give you advices on them.

Seriously, read the post from the 99% composite guy. Hard work pays off.

 

[xtsukiyox]

Y'know what? Standardized testing is a skill. Just like any skill, it takes practice, and some people are better at developing it than others. In particular, I believe the quant section is all about practicing how to do math problems quickly & how to determine (up front) if it's worth your time or if you should guess.

Question time: When you say you took the practice tests, did you take the Pearson ones? Also, did you stick to the time limits and whatnot to make the practice test as realistic as possible?

It's time to do some debriefing from the test - what did you feel was your biggest weakness? Did you have trouble with the material, or did you just run out of time? Did you have an attack of the test day panic? Focus your preparation based on these questions.

There is a rule Pearson has that you may want to keep in mind. If you increase your score by X (50 comes to mind) within a year, your score will be invalidated & you have to challenge and show proof of how you legitimately prepared to get such an increase. You may want to find out more information now, so you can save yourself some headache (& a serious freak out) later.

While it seems the easier path may be to go to a school that doesn't consider the PCAT, if you have your heart set on somewhere that does, I think it can be done. Good luck!

 

[kcwang]

Here is some math tips I think it will help when tackling QA section.

(Mentioned before, but very improtant) When you are taking the pcat QA, skip any problem with diagram and long sentences. Only go back to do them when you are finished with the rest.

When doing calculation questions, look through answers for a second to cross out any obvious wrong answer. Sometimes you dont even need to do the calculation because the answer is so obvious among the choices.

Always Simplify.

If you see a number more than 4 digits long, simplify it. For example, 14,369 -> 14000, sometimes even 2 digits, 58 ->60. This will make your life easier. This is especially a must if you see answer choices differ significantly. (ex: a. 1 b. 150 c. 500 d. 4503)

Simplify more
i^8 --> (i^2)^4

Know tricks,

log 1 = 0, log abc = log a + log b + log c etc..

If a problem takes more than 30 seconds to solve, skip it, you're probably doing it wrong (or not fast enough). They love to throw random stuff to throw you off (Practice lot of questions makes you immune to this).

Then there are the technicals, where you really need to know your stuff, like the relationship between position, velocity, acceleration, graphs of sin and cos, derivative of e^x etc..

I will stop right here for now. First time when I took QA, I got 88. Realized it is more about test taking skill and strategy, went back and got 99.