MCAT section weight

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I was wondering which of the three sections carrys the most weight. I've heard that a high verbal score will stand out more then a high bio score or something like that. Is this true?

And if one section seems to carry a little more weight, does anyone know which one that is? I'm just curious and my friends and I were talking about our MCAT score breakdowns the other night.

All things aside, I know you need a solid well-balenced score, but if there was one section to just rock, which would that be? Help me solve my argument...
 
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If its verbal, I'd be golden.

I'm pretty sure AAMC has something on their site depicting the correlation between Step 1 scores and MCAT sections. I'm sure you can find it on here somewhere, I just don't feel like looking.

Adcom members that I have spoken to at University of Maryland put the most emphasis on VR, but they put me on hold so I'm a little bitter about the positive feedback I've gotten for a strong VR score. You can study your brains out for high BS and PS but its a heck of a lot harder to pull out a high verbal score.

That being said, verbal is also the section that appears to be most "excused" if you bomb it (8-9 range) in light of high BS/PS. So that says to me it goes either way.
 
SDN people love to say that Verbal is the most looked at section (just do a search of the forums and you'll see that it's been discussed quite a bit at length) - but to be quite honest, I have never heard this outside of these forums. At my interviews, adcom people said they looked at sections either the same across the board (looked at the composite score) and two schools even indicated a decreased emphasis on the importance of the verbal (they said that the bio and phys were much more important to them).

That being said, getting a 9 is certainly not "bombing" the verbal (it's what I got). It's a decent score, and "close enough" to a 10 by most standards. 8 is borderline by most accounts. When you get into 7 and below, that's considered "bombing" it and can really make applications tough. I had a really rough time with the verbal, but my score didn't hurt me at all during applications.

I hope this helps!
 
AdmiralChz said:
SDN people love to say that Verbal is the most looked at section (just do a search of the forums and you'll see that it's been discussed quite a bit at length) - but to be quite honest, I have never heard this outside of these forums. At my interviews, adcom people said they looked at sections either the same across the board (looked at the composite score) and two schools even indicated a decreased emphasis on the importance of the verbal (they said that the bio and phys were much more important to them).

That being said, getting a 9 is certainly not "bombing" the verbal (it's what I got). It's a decent score, and "close enough" to a 10 by most standards. 8 is borderline by most accounts. When you get into 7 and below, that's considered "bombing" it and can really make applications tough. I had a really rough time with the verbal, but my score didn't hurt me at all during applications.

I hope this helps!
Click to expand...

I wasn't implying 8 or 9 is a terrible score, but go to the MCAT threads and you'll see everyone flipping out about an 8 or 9 section score...I think 8 or 9 is on the low end of an acceptable score - anything below should warrant a retake. I apologize for that coming off wrong.

OP, you can obviously see the answer is different depending on who you talk to. You'd have to ask committee members at the schools you're interested in because it depends school by school.
 
Threads like these scared the $hi+ out of me last year. I still can't believe that a 6 in verbal got me in where i wanted.
 
mtnman12 said:
http://www.aamc.org/students/mcat/research/bibliography/koeni008.htm

If that means anything to anyone, because i have no clue.

In my case I had a very low score but everytime I asked at an interview they said my GPA and other two sections easily made up for it and not to worry.
Click to expand...

This just seems to be a study involving composite MCAT scores. I guess you can assume that means that overall MCAT score is a better predictor of success than any given section by itself, but this is not justified in the experiment.
 
i think the most important section is bio in that if you do poorly in it (< 10) it will look especially bad since it is the section most people ace
 
I guess I'm more curious if anyone has heard anything about one section that would be the best to get a solid score. Not that we really care, we were just arguing that because med school is based on biology that bio would be best to get a solid score in but then we thought that a solid verbal shows something else... and so on.

I guess I may have answered my own question that they are all important, but we're stubborn and probably need more info. This was how we were thinking about it, if you were to get a 10, 10, 13 or something like that what would you want the 13 to be in?
 
I heard and read BS section was the most predictive of your future performance in Step 1.
 
Dr Simplicity said:
The data from the study below suggests that the BS section has the highest correlation to STEP 1 scores followed by Science GPA, PS, and then VR.

http://journals.lww.com/academicmed...rgraduate_Institutional_MCAT_Scores_as.5.aspx
Click to expand...

DoctorDeMan said:
http://www.springerlink.com/content/k131130487125756/

or

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/...nel.Pubmed_DefaultReportPanel.Pubmed_RVDocSum

or

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12377692?dopt=AbstractPlus

All suggest the BS section is the best indicator of performance on the USMLE step 1.
Click to expand...

SWEET! good step 1 score here i come!
 
gnu said:
I was wondering which of the three sections carrys the most weight. I've heard that a high verbal score will stand out more then a high bio score or something like that. Is this true?

And if one section seems to carry a little more weight, does anyone know which one that is? I'm just curious and my friends and I were talking about our MCAT score breakdowns the other night.

All things aside, I know you need a solid well-balenced score, but if there was one section to just rock, which would that be? Help me solve my argument...
Click to expand...


Depends. I, for example, did poorly in gen chem and physics. A great PS score balanced that out a bit. You can't say X>Y>Z for the sections because it depends on the person's application overall and the school.
 
SLU interviewer told me that verbal is the most important for them. Heard this from a bunch of schools.
 
Probably a few ounces for each section.
 
I think the verbal is just a sign of how well rounded the applicant is. Since most premeds are science majors, to do well in this section makes you stand out.
 
The Pre-Health advior at my school recommended reading as much as possible because she claims that the Verbal Reasoning score is looked at the most. This is the case at my colleges Med School at least
 
From what I have heard, VR tends to have a high correlation to PASSING your Board exams later down the road. Thus, some schools might be least forgiving of a VR score below their threshold versus another score. I would think that it would be in a schools best interest to make sure that their students will someday pass the boards, but focus on getting students most likely to get high Step 1 scores.
 
verbal... that's what adcom have been telling me. i'm not so sure i believe them 😀
i only say this because most top schools have high science scores and 10-11 on verbal seems standard for ALL schools... maybe it's especially important that you get the 10/11 but then high science scores just help you stand out?? 😕
 
gnu said:
I was wondering which of the three sections carrys the most weight. I've heard that a high verbal score will stand out more then a high bio score or something like that. Is this true?

And if one section seems to carry a little more weight, does anyone know which one that is? I'm just curious and my friends and I were talking about our MCAT score breakdowns the other night.

All things aside, I know you need a solid well-balenced score, but if there was one section to just rock, which would that be? Help me solve my argument...
Click to expand...

Verbal.
 
skinMD said:
SWEET! good step 1 score here i come!
Click to expand...
correlation.png
 
My interviewer said verbal score for him.
 
skinMD said:
i think the most important section is bio in that if you do poorly in it (< 10) it will look especially bad since it is the section most people ace
Click to expand...

How can most people ace it if its normalized to a bell-curve.
 
I suspect Skin really was referring to people accepted by a med school? not sure.

In speaking with lots of schools about this, I generally heard that either Bio section score or Verbal was most important. Maybe a slightly higher percentage of schools thought that BS was more important. No school told me that PS was the most important. As alluded to above, if you have 10 or higher scores for every section, you're in good shape for many schools. It's more a hypothetical question than anything to say "13 in BS, 10 in VR is better/worse than 10 in BS, 13 in VR). In either situation, schools would start to look more at ECs, LORs, GPAs, and other things rather than accepting the 10/13 and turning down the 13/10.

If you think the 13 in one section will make up for a 6-7 in another section, for most med schools, not so much -- you would not make their academic cut which often requires a 8/9 min for each section.
 
I would guess that the answer to this question is actually variable depending upon the school. I'm sure that if a medical school thinks their class average in any one section is getting a little too low, then that's the section that receives extra consideration in the next application cycle.

So, in summary: do the best you can on the MCAT. Strive for a fairly balanced score. A score of less than 7 in any section is likely to be a red flag.
 
mmagnett said:
How can most people ace it if its normalized to a bell-curve.
Click to expand...
The mean BS score is higher than the mean PS score which is higher then the mean VR score. This is available on AAMC if you want to check.
 
so i havent read all the replies to know if this has been said, but i have spoken to adcoms who have said they like to emphasize verbal because its pure critical thinking. They want to know you have this. With the other sections you can study the content, and combine it with some critical thinking, and do well. verbal is purely critical thinking and thats what its testing. its not just reading comprehension. So thats why theres a somewhat higher weight. Im sure this depends on the school as too how much weight and everyones application is different so its hard to say.

good luck
 
Glad to see some people provide evidence of what's most important (Bio Sci) rather than spout off anecdotes about how verbal is the king of the mcat. I challenge those who say verbal to back up their claim with some peer reviewed literature rather than stories like this adcom member said this, my cousin said that.
 
Pinkertinkle said:
Glad to see some people provide evidence of what's most important (Bio Sci) rather than spout off anecdotes about how verbal is the king of the mcat. I challenge those who say verbal to back up their claim with some peer reviewed literature rather than stories like this adcom member said this, my cousin said that.
Click to expand...

I agree with you... also, if this helps, I had two interviewers specifically say that I would not have gotten my interview if it weren't for my bio score (7PS10V13B). One of them even told me about some study that found a correlation between BS and step 1.

EDIT; looks like someone already quoted something about that study
 
The top tier schools tend to look for double digits in each section. I like to see not less than 20 in BS & PS combined. VR measures reading speed as much as anything else; we tend to go easy on non-native speakers particularly those who have lived in the US <10 years. That said, I like to see a confidence interval that includes or exceeds 50th percentile in VR.
 
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