Hey guys, I took both the AAMC non scored and scored exam within these past four days and got a 511 on both. How can I make sure I score a 515+ on Sept 1 when I will be taking the exam? I notice that a few more questions wrong and right in either direction could have easily put me from a 508-514. These few questions don't seem like a lot but seem to make a HUGE difference when applying to schools.
How to Score 515+
- Thread starter hugh2012
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I don't think we can give you the best answers until you tell us a bit more. Why are you getting the questions wrong? Are your scores equal across the sections? Are there particular topics that you are weak on and you guess when you get questions related to them? Have you reviewed the sample tests you took? What were your takeaways?
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I was scoring 511/512 on those exams and got a 515 on test day, so it can definitely be done!
If you haven't already, you might want to go through all the missed questions on at least one of the AAMC exams. Mark why you missed the question in the drop-down menu and write down the topic areas that you missed as you go through. I won't lie, this is tedious work and it will make you want to take a nap on your keyboard, especially since you have already seen and spent mental energy on all of those questions.
Once you're finished, the score report page will tell you what % you marked as each category in the "why did I miss this?" thing. That helped me a lot--I had a lot of "misunderstood the question" when I did that the first time. If you know why you're missing questions, you can come up with a strategy to fix it that way. I figured out that I needed to highlight key words from the question (like "NOT supported" and "best describes") every time, and being deliberate about that helped my score go up.
If, on the other hand, you realize that you're missing most of your questions from a few topic areas, you can hit them hard and use outside resources (not just your MCAT books) for better understanding. I had to go back and re-learn induced currents in a variety of ways before I could reliably answer questions--I really like Khan Academy for this if you aren't using it already, but I'm sure there are plenty of youtube videos out there, too.
If you haven't already, you might want to go through all the missed questions on at least one of the AAMC exams. Mark why you missed the question in the drop-down menu and write down the topic areas that you missed as you go through. I won't lie, this is tedious work and it will make you want to take a nap on your keyboard, especially since you have already seen and spent mental energy on all of those questions.
Once you're finished, the score report page will tell you what % you marked as each category in the "why did I miss this?" thing. That helped me a lot--I had a lot of "misunderstood the question" when I did that the first time. If you know why you're missing questions, you can come up with a strategy to fix it that way. I figured out that I needed to highlight key words from the question (like "NOT supported" and "best describes") every time, and being deliberate about that helped my score go up.
If, on the other hand, you realize that you're missing most of your questions from a few topic areas, you can hit them hard and use outside resources (not just your MCAT books) for better understanding. I had to go back and re-learn induced currents in a variety of ways before I could reliably answer questions--I really like Khan Academy for this if you aren't using it already, but I'm sure there are plenty of youtube videos out there, too.
Well, the easy answer is to get those questions right. But the problem is, if you're not getting those questions right, you're not getting them right for a reason. Are you weak on those topics? Review them. Are you missing subtleties? Try reading more slowly. But don't stress about a couple of questions because you'll never see those questions again. On the real MCAT, how many questions you get right is only your raw score - for each test version, there's a scaled score that is the curve. So if you have a hard test, you get more leeway with missing questions whereas if you get an easy test, you have a lot less leeway. So while on an easy test, a couple questions might turn out to have a 3-4 point effect on your scaled score, a couple of questions wrong on a hard test might have <1 point difference on your score. The important part is to not focus on your score but on why you got the questions on the practice FL wrong and to review those concepts.
