Learned helplessness

you can't give up so easily... sometimes things aren't fair or right, but overall this shouldn't stop you from pursuing your goals. I am currently taking this test for the third time and trust me, this journey has not been easy at all. Reschedule for another test date sometime in august or sept but first take a couple days off to get your mind cleared. Make a plan and go with it.

 

A logical reason, you say?

It's because you did worse on the sections the second time around. Is it possible you're just not capable of handling the information? I hate to be the guy who says it, but taking the first test and "guessing on 70%" of the questions without voiding is a terrible idea in the first place.

Studying and doing worse? Maybe you happened to get really lucky the first time, and then really unlucky the second, in that teeny probability zone where the bellcurves overlap? What were your verbal scores? They're conspicuously absent.

That sucks, honestly - but other than checking every day to see if seats open or taking a long road-trip, you're sort of SOL.

 

I have studied the MCAT a lot, and they are really good at making distractor answers. I have had practice exams that I felt I rocked that I did very poorly on because I fell for all of the distractors. Mayhaps this happened to you?

 

Were you overly confident? Did you go in thinking, "I've taken this once before; I have a leg up on everyone else here who's taking it for the first time"?

But otherwise, I agree that there is an element of chance on the MCAT. I took the test multiple times, and on my practice tests I never scored below a 29; on one real MCAT, I scored a 27. I have a friend who was consistently scoring in the 30-32 range on his practice MCATs, and on the day of his exam, he scored a 38. He claims he got lucky - all of the science questions were from his strongest areas within each subject, and he didn't encounter much of the material he had difficulty with.

Which isn't to say that the MCAT is totally random (I knew a guy who took it twice and scored a 40 each time - that's not random), but don't beat yourself up over it, either. Just study hard to remove the random elements.

 

If the passages and questions seem to be obvious/easy, there might be inherent tricks employed. This way they can gauge your thorough understanding of concepts. When the passages and questions seem odd/extreme, the answers are usually straight forward. They do this to test your anxiety/handling of stress. Just focus and heed every questions fairly. Also, there might be curves on each tests but they are usually very consistent from time to time.

EDIT: there seem to be no curves according to AAMC website: https://www.aamc.org/students/applying/mcat/preparing/85436/preparing_understandingscores.html However, the scoring process has accounted for small differences in difficulty. I mean the fluctuation between 1, 2, or 3 correct answers. Can this be biased? Yes, but the percentiles of scoring indicate its consistency from year to year.

 

Good to hear, keep it up!