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Anyone know how many you can get wrong and still get a 15/14/13/12/11/10 etc. on each section?
MCAT scoring?
- Thread starter drstrangelove
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It depends on how well the other people do. Your score is a reflection of your percentile. I took old MCATs for practice, and scores' correspondence to number right varied widely from test to test. Good luck!
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can you give an estimate?
i don't think it's necessarily curved since it's a standardized test.
i don't think it's necessarily curved since it's a standardized test.
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It is curved to a mean of ~8 on each section. If you look at the published examinee data on the AAMC website you will see the distributions:
http://www.aamc.org/students/mcat/examineedata/mcattbl1aprilaug.pdf
http://www.aamc.org/students/mcat/examineedata/mcattbl1aprilaug.pdf
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Don't approach it that way....Study for the test like your goal is to get every single question on that test correct. Besides...like everyone said, it varies depending on the administration.
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hi drstrangelove,
people aren't avoiding your question - it just that they really can't answer. the scoring varies HUGELY from test to test, and there's no way that any number could be quoted. From my vague recollection of practice tests, sometimes you need perfect or 1 mistake to get a 13+ in verbal. Sometimes you can make more than 10 mistakes for the same score. There is no consistent scheme, and it's likely to change even more with the reintroduction of 14 and 15 into the grading for verbal.
canadagirl
people aren't avoiding your question - it just that they really can't answer. the scoring varies HUGELY from test to test, and there's no way that any number could be quoted. From my vague recollection of practice tests, sometimes you need perfect or 1 mistake to get a 13+ in verbal. Sometimes you can make more than 10 mistakes for the same score. There is no consistent scheme, and it's likely to change even more with the reintroduction of 14 and 15 into the grading for verbal.
canadagirl
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dr strangelove--
http://www.aamc.org/students/mcat/essentials03.pdf. Any of the abundant materials on the MCAT will confirm that we DO know what we're talking about. The test HAS to be normalized so that medical schools can compare applicants who took the test in different years. Take UCLAMAN's advice: just focus on getting as many right as you can. When you take the test, don't worry if the questions seemed harder than normal--if you think the test is unusually hard, everyone else probably thought so, too.
http://www.aamc.org/students/mcat/essentials03.pdf. Any of the abundant materials on the MCAT will confirm that we DO know what we're talking about. The test HAS to be normalized so that medical schools can compare applicants who took the test in different years. Take UCLAMAN's advice: just focus on getting as many right as you can. When you take the test, don't worry if the questions seemed harder than normal--if you think the test is unusually hard, everyone else probably thought so, too.
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if you were to do a complete analysis of all the years the MCAT is administered, what would be the average number correct for each section for each score?
doesn't the MCAT do some sort of pre-testing before hand when they are experimenting with new questions?
doesn't the MCAT do some sort of pre-testing before hand when they are experimenting with new questions?
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I haven't seen any data on the # correct. It doesn't come with our score reports, and I haven't seen it in the summaries I've looked at.
Go to http://www.aamc.org/ and look under MCAT, then publications, and perhaps you'll see something you're looking for...for whatever reason you're concerned with it.
Go to http://www.aamc.org/ and look under MCAT, then publications, and perhaps you'll see something you're looking for...for whatever reason you're concerned with it.
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some of the practice books out there have a sort of rubric for scoring in the back, but i can't remember any offhand and can't do you much good because i threw those suckers away the second i got my august scores back. what with the disparity between the number of questions for verbal and the science sections, i think you'd have to do a lot better on the verbal to get a better score now. but yeah, it's curved each time to the people who took it.
there was an interesting debate a while back whether the april or the august mcat had the better curve. you figure more people take it in april, so the curve might be better with more people, but then in august people have had a whole summer to study so they might do better, making the curve worse. but it's hard to change your score, so then again the curve could be more lenient. heck, it's all a crapshoot, so put it out of your head and just study. good luck!
there was an interesting debate a while back whether the april or the august mcat had the better curve. you figure more people take it in april, so the curve might be better with more people, but then in august people have had a whole summer to study so they might do better, making the curve worse. but it's hard to change your score, so then again the curve could be more lenient. heck, it's all a crapshoot, so put it out of your head and just study. good luck!
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Believe me ... after several times jumping up and down (mostly down) in the verbal section I realized that if you start crunching out the numbers and figuring out how many questions you can miss and still get a certain score ... you're setting yourself up for not doing your best. Worst off, you might panic if you can only miss 10 questions on a section, and you are not sure of 11 of your answers.
Just a thought.
Just a thought.
