monaheel said:
Hey,
First off, congrats to everyone reading this who just took the MCAT; it's over, and I'm sure your hard work will pay off
. For those of us taking the MCAT in January, if you could offer any advice about the CBT (advantages, drawbacks, what do you wish you had known earlier, would you have altered the way you studied any, and so forth), I would greatly appreciate it!!
The writing section was much easier to complete since I could go back and edit my essay after I finished typing it with time to spare. Although the writing score may not mean much, it was still nice to feel good writing/typing a good essay as opposed to frantically writing, scribbling an essay with a cramped hand. Then you realize you forgot to mention a point earlier in the essay.
You don't have to deal with proctors, which is nice. You start whenever you go in, and you don't have to take the required breaks. I took a 20 minute lunch break and was ready to move on.
The highlighting feature was pretty useful, particularly for the verbal passages. I hated bubbling into scantrons, so just clicking A,B,C,D was convenient.
I THOUGHT the noiseless headphone were going to be useful, and maybe they were. I used them for the PS and VR sections, no problems. The AC vents at the testing center were loud as hell, and I had been practicing exams in essentially complete silence. I didn't use the headphones on the WS. Then I put them back on for the BS, and by the time I got to my 3rd passage, I developed a headache. I took it off and felt better, went to the 4th passage and put the headphones back on. The headache came back, so I just left them off the rest of the BS section. So I don't know if using them for a long period of time causes headaches.
If you are ahead of the other test takers and move to the BS section while everyone was working on the WS, then you have to listen to everyone type on their keyboards which was pretty annoying.
Overall, I liked the CBT version.