MCAT Percentile Discrepancy?

[SomeQuestions]

Hey everyone, I did a quick search to see if anyone else has posted regarding this and didn't find anything, but I apologize if it is a duplicate. I just finished my first Kaplan practice exam with an overall score of 499, distributed as follows: 123, 125, 126, 125, in Chem/Phys, CARS, Bio/Bchm, and Psyc, respectively. According to Kaplan, my percentile rankings were, correspondingly, 33rd, 62nd, 67th, and 55th, with an overall percentile of 49th. If you average the individual percentiles, however, it comes to just over 54th. Thinking this was maybe an issue with Kaplan's numbers, I checked the official AAMC data. Their percentiles for the most recent data are 32nd, 61st, 65th, 52nd, which averages out to roughly 53rd, but they report 499 as 47th percentile. Given the overall score represents equal weighting of each section, this does not make sense to me. Am I missing something, or is there some mathematical voodoo going on here?

Unfortunately, I have not posted to this forum enough to include a link, but the data I used is from the AAMC student site under the "Current Percentile Ranks for the MCAT Exam" PDF.

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[MoDiddy]

Take 3rd party FL's with a grain of salt and just focus on learning from them. Take an AAMC exam when you want a true measure of where you stand.

 

[SomeQuestions]

Regardless, neither Kaplan's nor the AAMC's percentiles seem to stack up correctly. Assuming each section is uniformly weighted (as the scoring system suggests), shouldn't the average percentile of all sections equate to the overall percentile? Using the AAMC's published data, my percentile rankings per section average at approximately 53rd (that's [32+61+65+52]/4=52.5), while the overall score is ranked as 47th percentile. I don't understand what's happening to the other 6 when you compare the combined average against the overall percentile.

 

[Master Thinker]

I'm not sure how percentiles really correlate to your score, but the exam is scaled in some way. AAMC is still the best indicator of how you will do on the exam.