It's hilarious that this discussion always comes up and I always find myself saying the same thing. Unless AAMC comes out with a written report on how the scores are calculated, everything is speculation. NO ONE KNOWS HOW THE SCORES ARE CALCULATED PERIOD. I don't care who says what, who spoke to whom, or how many MCAT conventions you attended. I want to see written proof from AAMC. If you ask me, I don't think anything is predetermined, I think the people taking the test on that day definetly factor in big time, and I think the real thing often ends up having a curve depending on the test takers, and the test difficulty.
Come on now, next thing you're going to do is tell people that WWF is not real wrestling and that reality shows are actually staged. How can you say that the MCAT curve is not 100% preset prior to anyone taking the exam and that they don't already know exactly what schools everyione will attend and the careers they are going to have? Urban myths have to get started somehow, and you sure are a party-pooper trying to squelch this one.
On a serious note, I want to respond to your post in that years ago (late 90s if I recall correctly), they gave a brief description of
field tested versus
non-field tested passages and how they dealt with the data from each. That listing disappeared pretty quickly. They also listed 300 prompts for the essay composition from which they draw, and that too was down within a few weeks. Someone at AAMC headquarters probably took a bunch of heat for sharing too much on their website.
Based on what I've read and heard from AAMC, I tend to believe they follow typical statistical methods (which they use as their calling card for their validity) which includes the methods they described in that post. I'm not sure if your comment about conferences was a swipe at a post I made quite a while ago about the workshop on the MCAT at the AAMC anual conference, but they did briefly comment that the curve is an
evolving curve. They use historical data as well as data from the current batch of test takers to establish their curve. So while some comments in this thread about the curve being
pre-determined have taken things to an extreme, the curve to some extent is pre-established. However, the people disregarding the fact that current scores are also included in that pool are missing the point.
Thats kind of an ignorant comment, the scores are always set to a standard bell curve with 26 roughly being 50th percentile, while there may be slight variation from test to test, but for the most part the bell curve is always the same. Your scores are all relative to how everyone else did. I still think you can somewhat accurately calculate how well you do though, i know i got pretty good at estimating my scores when i was studying, (yes i know they were practice test).
I do think what captain Ellerby says is somewhat right though. But bottom line is that the AAMC isn't going to let one test date be "easier" than another.
They do set scores based on a bell-curve (normalization), but the total data pool includes numbers from previous examinees as well as current examinees. This balances out the
seasonal impact on the curve that you and a few others talk about. If they did it exactly as you say, then
EVERY exam would have the exact same distribution, which they definitely do not. Also, the means for 2007 were PS 8.4, VR 8.0, and BS 8.8 and not 8, 8, 8 as a pre-established bell curve would have generated.
We (BR) are sort of nutty about statistics, and we evaluate our student's scores from a bunch of different angles. Before 2006, the going rumor was that the August curve was harder than the April curve. What we found was that such a notion was overrated. The reduced distratcions of summer (better ability to focus on the MCAT without having school) was offset by repeat test-takers who were inherently worse test takers than the average MCATeer. There was little to no difference between the two test dates.
What we have found with the CBT is that most people claim their test date was the hardest of all.
🙂
Seriously though, we have found that the time of day and weekday versus weekend make a bigger difference than the month you choose for your exam. There are all sorts of theories as to why, mostly having to do with analyzing the test-takers nature. I'm sure it can be explained by that, but at the end of the day, all of the conditions around the test are far less important to a test-takers score than three basic things:
- Focus and the ability to avoid careless mistakes
Confidence and the ability to negotiate anxieties during the exam when the weird passages present themsleves
Time management and one's preparation for going through questions quickly, but not in a hurry.
Admittedly, we do spend about ten minutes of class time in our opening class explaining the advantages and disadvantages of various test dates, so I'm being a bit hypocritical in downplaying it here. But in the end, good test takers get good scores, period.
