Methanol blinds you and ethanol makes you feel good. And kills you. Kind of different. I think I've had a bit more experience designing experiments than you have, but I'll play along (you're right, my PI did kick me out.... after I defended my dissertation).
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Thank you for the lesson on methanol vs ethanol, I bet only about almost everyone who studied for the MCAT knew that. Very helpful. Great stuffs!
In science as well as medicine, we generally use multiple approaches to test the same thing because that improves statistical power. So if I want to see the degree of backbonding in an organometallic complex, I might use IR along with UV or Raman so that I can verify that what I'm measuring is actually the thing I want to measure.
The MCAT measures things like reasoning within the text, reasoning beyond the text, etc. If you want to see what exactly each question is trying to measure, you can go through the AAMC FLs and read the description of the answer choices. The last sentence will tell you the overarching ability it's trying to measure. Sure, the content of the passage may be different but the passages are designed to measure the same abilities. The reason you have so many passages is because that improves statistical power - kind of like an MMI, actually.
Right,t except that instead of 8 passages with 8 different topics you have 5 O.chem+3 General chem vs 5 physics + 3 biochem.
Besides, talk is cheap! Go pick among the numerous official AAMC material 2 passages of vastly different topics (kinematics vs light, Alcohol oxidation vs Enzyme kinetics, Anatomy vs Immunology etc...) and show how they measure "the same things."
Bonus point if they are of the same "difficulty" (lmao)
Here:
https://students-residents.aamc.org/applying-medical-school/article/how-new-mcat-exam-scored/. Relevant quotes:
"
The conversion of raw scores to scaled scores compensates for small variations in difficulty between sets of questions. The exact conversion of raw to scaled scores is not constant because different sets of questions are used on different exams. The 15-point scale tends to provide a more stable and accurate assessment of a student's abilities.
Two students of equal ability would be expected to get the same scaled score, even though there might be a slight difference between the raw scores each student obtained on the test."
"While there may be small differences in the MCAT exam you took compared to another examinee, the scoring process accounts for these differences."
"How you score on the MCAT exam is not reflective of the particular exam you took—including the time of day, the test date, or the time of year—since any difference in difficulty level is accounted for when calculating your scaled scores (see above for information about scaling)."
So you quoted a sale pitch with no data no methodology and just tell me to take their words for it. Gotcha. Very authority. Great stuffs.
Again, there is no luck involved if one is at a 7/10 depth on all topics on the content outline. If one is comfortable with all topics listed, then there shouldn't be any surprise when a particular topic is tested on during test day.
But luck is involved if the topic ones are not familiar with do not appear on test day! For example, in your case, there was no physics :wink:
You are free to judge the quality of your TAs however you like. But don't get butthurt if you don't understand the words he/she is using because you don't have a PhD-level understanding of the topic. A good TA will be good at explaining the fundamentals to a layperson, yes. But in some cases, it is difficult to explain a concept to another person when there is a huge knowledge gap between the two. The more knowledgeable person assumes that the other person knows more than he/she does and hence the use of "big words." At the same time, I realize that you might have a better knowledge of topic A in physics than I do because my PhD is in chemistry. I won't pretend otherwise. But in terms of what the MCAT tests on, I felt that I had a 9/10 depth in all of the C/P topics on there.
No, a good TA doesn't pretend that he doesn't know. Just say "I don't know." It's difficult to explain because he doesn't know enough. I can ask a
real professor and get a very satisfactory answer. Dude told me to look at Maxwell's equations (lmao) and some of its derivatives. And just in case you are not sure why I was amused by the answers because you can ask me basically anything physics related and I can tell you to look at Maxwell's equations.
And no, my physics education stopped at physics 2
🙁 Thanks for the compliment though.
Those are basic questions that 99.99% of undergrad never asked. You don't need a PhD in physics to utter the words "Special relativity." Same thing for biology, I asked my good TA that if the endosymbiotic theory was true, why did the chloroplasts of plant cells have membrane bound compartments. He just said he didn't know. That's what knowledge people do.
MCAT passages aren't designed to test whether someone has outside knowledge. They have discretes for that. So your question (1) would not appear on the MCAT unless somewhere in the passage it says that Coumadin is a blood-thinning drug. I believe most people who have taken the MCAT would agree with this. Give a better example and I'll have a clearer picture of what you're trying to say.
Lol. That term falls under the topic of blood clotting. If one studies the cascade, one should know the regulatory mechanism. There are basically 2 main blood thinners available: heparin and wafarin (Coumadin). If one can memorize the start and stop codons despite they don't appear anywhere on the content outline, I don't see why one should not know about coumadin. Unless you are arguing that blood clotting is not important!! Ok, maybe Coumadin is a bit much bit at least one should know what heparin does.
But I used Coumadin because I want you to not know what it was to drive home the point that, if you had knew it, your chance of getting the right answer plummeted from 25% to 0.1%. You see, you and like every single person reading this thread had missed the point of the questions entirely. That's a clue. Using your reasoning skill you should've come up with the right answer now! Just to be safe, second clue: it's a physics question.
You cannot judge the difficulty of a questions based on % of correct answers.
Total score doesn't have a +/- 2 range. At least not in my experience. The lower range of my confidence interval was 522, not 524. But I believe you just argued that the confidence intervals are BS.
Actually, I just wanted to make sure you realized that the +/-1 confident interval cannot be applied to
both 125 and 131. Can you smell the BS in the air? Check for Alzheimer's.
Different version, same conditions. The one-point variation is in there because of the fact that you can't dissociate the impact on your second score of just having been through an MCAT once prior.
Is familiarity with certain topics included in those "conditions"?
The reason is that CARS measures only one skill: everything encompassed under analytical reasoning. You can't memorize something for the CARS section because there's nothing to memorize.
If you believe that common consensus among people who have already taken it on here is the same thing as anecdotal evidence, then I don't know what else to tell you.
Statistics can tell you nothing about how easy or hard it is to improve on CARS. It can only tell you how confident the people are who measured it that the "real" mean of test-takers is within the interval listed. There is no data on differences in subsection scores for people who have taken the CARS multiple times. So the only thing anybody can rely on is consensus. That's better than nothing, which seems to be what you have.
Why spend more time on one subject if you can spend just as much time on all four subjects? There's no limitation on time here except that which is self-imposed. If you want to spend 4 months on one subject to give yourself a 10/10 depth on all topics in that subject, then you might as well do the same for the other subjects. After a certain point (my opinion = 7/10), there are no returns.
I would try NSF. You'd probably have better luck there. But better stop talking like you're 14. Unless you're like Sheldon Cooper or something.
In other words, you have no data. Better than nothing? Your claim was that CARS was hard to improve. I don't have to do a thing. That's the beauty of it
🙂
Besides, here is a confidential piece of info: When you retake an MCAT, not only your CARS but your C/P, B/S, P/S scores are also documented in the curves..... Don't tell anybody!
You did the illogical analysis to begin with. You do the math again correctly and present an argument with mathematical basis on why your 50% or 20% of questions gotten right by guessing translates directly into the score distribution.
Why? It would prove nothing as I've stated. I just don't have the data. I can tear myself a new one on my own idea. It's better than nothing precisely because is open to objective criticism. Like, if I wanted to investigated why the German failed at taking the Soviet Union in WWII, one could point to the number of troops, supplied, winter, aids from the U.S etc... Everything is open to debate. But if you come in and say that "it was because of the indomitable spirit of the children of mother Russia! Ask any Soviet veterans. They were there. They will tell you!" Sound familiar?
Want to tell me where you got those numbers for 59 = 132, 57-58 = 131...? The AAMC doesn't release that data because each exam is different and is curved according to difficulty of the exam itself. The quotes above from the AAMC directly confirm that. Here, I'll quote it again for ya:
"The exact conversion of raw to scaled scores is not constant because different sets of questions are used on different exams."
You quoted a sale pitch. How did you think they do that? So now we come back to how can they compare the "difficulty" of 2 exams?
Besides, think of this scenario. In the very first MCAT exam, supposed that the maximum correct answers in B/S achieved was 55.
No. I had an adequate 7/10 depth for that section (most of that depth is from reviewing QPacks and reading well-written articles). Like I said, one can waste weeks or months going into 10/10 depth for the MCAT. But after a certain point, there's no improvement in score. That's my opinion. If you want others' as well, ask that question in the MCAT forums. It's been asked before.
I thought you claimed that critical reasoning skills were all that were needed to score 520+: the top few points!
