new MCAT trending high?

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efle said:
I'd be interested to see the evidence that parental involvement is higher for higher scorers after controlling for SES
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Sorry couldn't get to this sooner.

Again, no one said it was tested for higher scores. We are talking about infants and young children. As far as I know there is no study that asks 21 y/os after they take the MCAT how much their parents spoke to them as a child or what were their expectations lol

Using current knowledge about early performance trending similarly through school ages, percentiles being relatively stagnant over time as well as various other psychological knowledge of both development and education, the task is to then interpret, predict and pose ways in which culture can affect things like test scores long term. And because it's SDN, I am not saying it is the ONLY contributing factor, just an interesting aspect that should be taken into account.

My point is to highlight cultural differences that occur even as newborns and and continue to be pervasive over time.

So here are some of the sources I mentioned, someone who gave a recent presentation kindly forwarded me some of their references including on motor development which I think is equally as important as early learning is heavily dependent on physical exploration compounded by timeline of synaptogenesis.

Pachter LM, Dworkin PH. Maternal Expectations About Normal Child Development in 4 Cultural Groups. Arch Pediatr Adolesc Med. 1997;151(11):1144-1150. doi:10.1001/archpedi.1997.02170480074011.http://archpedi.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=518581

Adolph, K.E., Karasik L.B., and Tamis-LeMonda C.S. 2010. “Moving Between Cultures: Cross-Cultural REsearch on Motor Development.” New York University. Vol. 1. Domains of Development Across Cultures. http://jakestone.net/wikipics/pdfs/CultureChapter.pdf

Keller, H., Voelker, S. and Yovsi, R.D. 2002. “The Role of Motor Stimulation In Parental Ethnotheories: The Case of Cameroonian Nso and German Women”. Jouranl of Cross-Cultral Psychology. Vol 33. No, 4 July 2002 398-414.

Opper, S. 1992. “Hong Kong’s Young Children: Their Early Development and Learning”. HKU Press. https://books.google.com/books?id=8...CYKHdIAAfkQ6AEIWDAH#v=snippet&q=motor&f=false

Kaplan, H., Dove, H. 1987. “Infant Development Among the Ache of Eastern Paraguay”. Developmental Psycholgoy, Vol 23(2), Mar 187, 190-198. http://psycnet.apa.org/psycinfo/1987-18314-001

Mei, J. (1994). The Northern Chinese custom of rearing babies in sandbags: Implications for motor and intellectual development. In J. H. A. van Rossum and J. I. Laszlo (Eds.), Motor develop-ment: Aspects of normal and delayed development. Amsterdam: VU Uitgeverij.

Schulze, P. A., Harwood, R. L., and Schoelmerich, A. (2001). Feeding practices and expectations among middle-class Anglo and Puerto Rican mothers of 12-month-old infants. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 32, 397-406.

Bril, B., Zack, M., and Nkounkou-Hombessa, E. (1989). Ethnotheories of development and education: A view from dif- ferent cultures. European Journal of Psychology of Education, 4, 307-318.
 
I figured out where the data on MCAT2015 results being similar to old MCAT came from (Case):

"It was standing room only this am for the MCAT2015 update. So far, performance outcomes seem similar as to the old MCAT. CARS section looks to give test takers the most difficulty."

 
I don't understand, the test has always been built around percentiles. It's impossible to have performance differences like "trending high" unless the population of premeds changed along with the test
 
efle said:
I don't understand, the test has always been built around percentiles. It's impossible to have performance differences like "trending high" unless the population of premeds changed along with the test
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The current one doesn't have as much historical data though. So the way they scaled the scores might result in percentiles that are a bit off from the ideal distribution.
 
hyderali91 said:
The current one doesn't have as much historical data though. So the way they scaled the scores might result in percentiles that are a bit off from the ideal distribution.
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The MCAT curve is built to be normal from the percentiles per raw score data though. This is why on the old scale you saw things like upper end scores 1 question = 1 point up or down, while towards the middle several questions = 1 point up or down. The only way for "new MCAT scores trend high" to actually make sense would be if the AAMC built a skewed distribution off of the raw+percentiles, which we know they didn't do.
 
efle said:
The MCAT curve is built to be normal from the percentiles per raw score data though. This is why on the old scale you saw things like upper end scores 1 question = 1 point up or down, while towards the middle several questions = 1 point up or down. The only way for "new MCAT scores trend high" to actually make sense would be if the AAMC built a skewed distribution off of the raw+percentiles, which we know they didn't do.
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At least with the old MCAT, the scale was decided before any particular session is administered. If they're still doing that with the new one (and in fairness, I have no idea if they are), their data might not yet be sufficient to get accurate results that way.
 
hyderali91 said:
At least with the old MCAT, the scale was decided before any particular session is administered. If they're still doing that with the new one (and in fairness, I have no idea if they are), their data might not yet be sufficient to get accurate results that way.
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For making this first distribution they waited to have several test dates worth of data from early spring before anyone was given their exact scores. It's a normal curve just like the old test. Same frequency of top 10%, 5%, 1% applicants. I think the whole "trending high" thing is illusory for the reasons I mentioned earlier, not all adcoms have realized that the point systems are not 1:1 comparable (eg 131 CARS is not a 14 V). For schools that compare via percentiles (and I'm shocked any schools wouldn't) this should all be a non-issue
 
so is this a good thing or a bad thing for those of us applying with the old mcat?
 
Spector1 said:
so is this a good thing or a bad thing for those of us applying with the old mcat?
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Should be neutral, may be bad. That is, a school looking at percentiles will credit your 13 V as much as a 132 CARS. A school looking only at scores will favor the 132.
 
efle said:
Should be neutral, may be bad. That is, a school looking at percentiles will credit your 13 V as much as a 132 CARS. A school looking only at scores will favor the 132.
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Although there is the countering gyngyn theory of old MCAT having a slight advantage due to warm, fuzzy, anthropomorphic, sentimental familiarity.
 
The only section of the MCAT where I see any kind of real difference is the bio.

The bio average had creeped up on the old MCAT. Beating only 4/7 test takers was enough to get you a 10. Beating 2/7 was enough to get you an 8. That seems to be corrected for on this new test where you need to beat out 68% of the testing population to hit 128. All these other things are more minor IMO.

What I will say is for those who say old test takers have an advantage, there are a number of schools starting next cycle while even if they accept teh old MCAT will prefer the new one. Even more so for 2017. So any potential "Advantage" old takers have could easily be erased through that.
 
I will admit that I hated to see the interpretation of my score bounce around from 33 to 35. It is a 516, which is 95%, a percentile that did not correspond to the old test.
 
Waiting with bated breath to see how the msar formats all these numbers.
 
efle said:
Yup, as competition for seats creeps ever upwards, the fuzzy feely safe number increases to 31 / 510 / 83rd percentile.

In another ten years you'll probably need to score close to top decile to feel good
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Average MD matriculant average 10 years ago was a 30. Now it's a 31.4. 10 years from now, if that trend holds, itll be equivalent of a 33 which is 88.1-91st percentile. So yep, 90th percentile would be my prediction indeed.
 
gyngyn said:
Of course.
This confirms my point, though. 510 gives that fuzzy that you just don't feel with 509...
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It is kind of funny how the numbers work. 509 is a 30. 510 is a 31. 511 becomes a 32. But so is 513. No real rhyme or reason to how this new scale functions and I can imagine a 511 and 513 being looked at exactly the same while a 511 vs 509 is a 32 vs a 30 on the old scale.
 
efle said:
SES controlled ofc. Stereotype threat is an interesting one since afaik it can do a good job of explaining low performance from threatened minorities but can't explain overperformance by some other groups (eg Ashkenazi Jewish outperforming Caucasian). Strikes me as clearly a big part of the answer, but only a part.
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IQs can usually only increase by a third of a point per generation even with genius parents due to regression to the mean. However, what happens when it becomes part of the culture that the most intelligent folk (rabbis who learn 5+ languages, have high academic abilities, but low spatial intelligence) have the largest families? In this scenario, you have the smarties increasing the intelligence of the population slowly. BUT Ashkenazi Jews have been culturally selecting for intelligence for thousands of years. The only other cultures that do anything that even comes close are the east Asian cultures and hey, they're also above Caucasians in terms of raw IQ and reaction speed/reflexes.
 
I disagree. They are definitely trending low as far as I can tell.
 
Dr Tony T. Chopper said:
Oh boy here we go again. How can you possibly propose a metric to control for something as elusive as quality of parenting?
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I didn't propose a metric to control for the quality of parenting. I made the statement because parenting is incredibly important and you can't control for it.
 
Hildace said:
I didn't propose a metric to control for the quality of parenting. I made the statement because parenting is incredibly important and you can't control for it.
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When you have time or are taking a 30 minute drive, this kind of goes against your premise about parenting affecting intelligence. Adoption studies were used.

TL; DW: We can malnourish a child so they end up shorter than they would have been, but you can't raise children to be taller than their genetics allow.

 
darknecrosforte said:
When you have time or are taking a 30 minute drive, this kind of goes against your premise about parenting affecting intelligence. Adoption studies were used.

TL; DW: We can malnourish a child so they end up shorter than they would have been, but you can't raise children to be taller than their genetics allow.

Click to expand...




Not sure this applies to enhancing learning during synaptogenesis, increasing language abilities (semantics, syntax, orthography) during the critical years, or teaching beyond the classroom, ahead of the traditional trajectory. All of which parenting approaches can do.

All of these things are plastic, and you have to "work" them to find their ceilings. A better analogy would be you can train a child to be more athletic than they would have been without. You can very well "nourish" your way to more flexibility, muscle mass, agility and so on.

This is like saying SES doesn't affect our parameters of intelligence. It's not just genetics when testing academic performance.
 
darknecrosforte said:
When you have time or are taking a 30 minute drive, this kind of goes against your premise about parenting affecting intelligence. Adoption studies were used.

TL; DW: We can malnourish a child so they end up shorter than they would have been, but you can't raise children to be taller than their genetics allow.

Click to expand...


I disagree with you on a fundamental level regarding the plasticity of intelligence. I'm not going to get into a debate about it. You are more than welcome to continue researching the subject.
 
I'm pretty sure you're all referring to horizontal plasticity concerning skills and competencies rather than vertical, which is the one that gives a person a higher "ceiling" or rate of learning. The latter is the one we're interested in because it is the one that we attribute to "social injustice".
 
WhittyPsyche said:
Not sure this applies to enhancing learning during synaptogenesis, increasing language abilities (semantics, syntax, orthography) during the critical years, or teaching beyond the classroom, ahead of the traditional trajectory. All of which parenting approaches can do.

All of these things are plastic, and you have to "work" them to find their ceilings. A better analogy would be you can train a child to be more athletic than they would have been without. You can very well "nourish" your way to more flexibility, muscle mass, agility and so on.

This is like saying SES doesn't affect our parameters of intelligence. It's not just genetics when testing academic performance.
Click to expand...

Pay attention to what I actually typed. I said we can stunt the natural growth of children. This is AFFECTING. I'm saying that guys who do this studying for a living show data that go against the feels of most people. We like to pretend that our kids are so smart, empathetic, etc. because of how awesome we are as parents when it really is more like "we haven't screwed them up".
 
darknecrosforte said:
I'm pretty sure you're all referring to horizontal plasticity concerning skills and competencies rather than vertical, which is the one that gives a person a higher "ceiling" or rate of learning. The latter is the one we're interested in because it is the one that we attribute to "social injustice".
Click to expand...

You compared something like bone length to what parents can do to impact academic performance. You don't think that parental influence changes the in between without hitting the ceiling? If genetics determines the ceiling, absolute (which I don't agree with, but let's disregard that), then do you think every person is operating at their ceiling throughout schooling?

Or are most of us somewhere in the in between and parental impacts can help identify, target, and enhance performance, maximizing the ceiling. The point is your bones aren't plastic like your mind and brain, almost no other physical comparison can be made. Thus, it's a poor analogy and ignores obvious factors in intelligence.
 
darknecrosforte said:
Pay attention to what I actually typed. I said we can stunt the natural growth of children. This is AFFECTING. I'm saying that guys who do this studying for a living show data that go against the feels of most people. We like to pretend that our kids are so smart, empathetic, etc. because of how awesome we are as parents when it really is more like "we haven't screwed them up".
Click to expand...

It goes both ways, in both directions. It's like immigrant families that teach kids math earlier, more frequently, and more intensely. The typical person doing the status quo isn't "screwing their child", but the person pushing potential is maximizing their abilities.

Crude example, kid 1 takes Calc, preps for Calc test. Parent 1 for all intents and purposes did their job as we define it.

Kid 2's parent made him learn more on the side, the ins and outs of theory, focused more on proofs, instilled live, breathe, eat Calc behaviors. Kid 2 performs better on a Calc test, not necessarily because he is genetically more intelligent, he was just trained better.

The parental action pushed the threshold further to the ceiling, while kid 1 never explored all his potential. Parent one didn't screw up the kid. He was just limited, by the non-biological factors.
 
WhittyPsyche said:
The parental action pushed the threshold further to the ceiling, while kid 1 never explored all his potential. Parent one didn't screw up the kid. He was just limited, by the non-biological factors.
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The bolded is the fundamental disagreement. Kids are all born curious. They all tell the truth initially. What parents do is smack them when they tell Aunt Ruth that she's fat, which creates an incentive for lying. Or they ask the kid who broke the window and give a negative consequence rather than show the kid how to clean up broken glass and give them ping pong balls to throw instead of baseballs. They generally have a "do as I say and not as I do" approach and wonder why peer influences are stronger than parental influences. In short, we forget that kids are only copying what their parents do until our hypocrisy reaches a threshold and they look elsewhere.

We do not make the piano-playing 5-year old Asian a genius, we provide incentives to practice (attention and positive reinforcement). The skill is NOT what makes the kid intelligent. The intelligence is how fast it is learned or how efficiently. The average instrument playing kid has about 10,000 hours of practice before you see them as a 12 year-old playing caprice 24 on violin. But don't mistake that for intelligence. Some people take much longer to get to that level. THAT is where intelligence comes in.

Back to the argument, your arguments being true require that training is the predominant factor in performance. There are poorly-identified testable variables. Parents "doing their job" and intelligence need to be defined. I refer to the g-factor definition in psychometrics which says that there is a positive correlation in a general intelligence that underlies Gardner's theory of multiple intelligence. It also mostly applies to non-children because at that point, they have enough experience to fully integrate the separate lines of intelligence or skill sets (eg. relating chemistry and cooking to get better at both). A high g individual will learn faster and integrate better, regardless of SES or parenting.

Also stating that parent 2 has to make their kid "live, eat, and breathe Calc" is extraneous and it assumes that kids can't learn things without some overseer feeding them the knowledge. If you've watched a very young child study bugs or flowers, you see that they have intense focus and patience which are qualities that normally serve them well in the future when they study. But as they get older and indoctrinated in a largely-Prussian-style schooling system that forces them into rows of lectures, this patience, curiosity, and focus goes away. This is especially true for boys who get "diagnosed" with ADHD, aka. boring, tenured teachers need to get fired disease. I do not accept the idea that a child is a passive vessel that will not assimilate the surroundings unless fed the information.
 
darknecrosforte said:
The bolded is the fundamental disagreement. Kids are all born curious. They all tell the truth initially. What parents do is smack them when they tell Aunt Ruth that she's fat, which creates an incentive for lying. Or they ask the kid who broke the window and give a negative consequence rather than show the kid how to clean up broken glass and give them ping pong balls to throw instead of baseballs. They generally have a "do as I say and not as I do" approach and wonder why peer influences are stronger than parental influences. In short, we forget that kids are only copying what their parents do until our hypocrisy reaches a threshold and they look elsewhere.
Click to expand...

This is a gross and erroneous oversimplification of parenting styles. The style you describe, is probably what you grew up with, but it in no way described the overarching parenting approach. All parents do not solely utilize negative consequences to teach new information or correct behaviors. There are three parenting styles, and the variations in between each in just the Western culture, these do not account for those of other parts of the world. Peer influences being stronger than parental influences is also a western phenomena and not representative of children in general. You've also brought in telling the truth here, which really is not relevant to the previous discussion as telling the truth and lying is completely environment-dependent and a product of conditioning. From this part alone, I am going to guess you are not familiar with development and parenting principles so perhaps we need not go on on this tangent.

darknecrosforte said:
We do not make the piano-playing 5-year old Asian a genius, we provide incentives to practice (attention and positive reinforcement). The skill is NOT what makes the kid intelligent. The intelligence is how fast it is learned or how efficiently. The average instrument playing kid has about 10,000 hours of practice before you see them as a 12 year-old playing caprice 24 on violin. But don't mistake that for intelligence. Some people take much longer to get to that level. THAT is where intelligence comes in.
Click to expand...

No one said this person is made a genius, again bringing in musical ability is murkying the water. But to address it, musical intelligence is the ability, the capacity to learn, understand, perform, innovate. The intelligence is defined by the gift. Gardner did not define this by the speed in which one manifests the talent. As such, at any age, you can have the same level of intelligence based on patterns of thinking and performance.

darknecrosforte said:
Back to the argument, your arguments being true require that training is the predominant factor in performance. There are poorly-identified testable variables. Parents "doing their job" and intelligence need to be defined. I refer to the g-factor definition in psychometrics which says that there is a positive correlation in a general intelligence that underlies Gardner's theory of multiple intelligence. It also mostly applies to non-children because at that point, they have enough experience to fully integrate the separate lines of intelligence or skill sets (eg. relating chemistry and cooking to get better at both). A high g individual will learn faster and integrate better, regardless of SES or parenting.
Click to expand...

What you seem to be missing here is that yes there are inherent abilities, but that does not mean that an individual with the ability will have honed in on that ability, and it has a lot to do with parenting and culture. For example, your 5-year old asian kid with high musical intelligence, if was raised in a subsaharan dessert village where playing the piano was impossible, where playing the piano was to valued by the parents/village, where there was not opportunity to prune the skill. Would he grow up as a piano-playing genius? No, guess not. The parental values presents the opportunity, allows that 10,000 hours of practice you cite, provides the encouragement to continue honing the skill. If those things were absent there is no way to manifest that intelligence, thus, the ceiling/potential is not reached.

darknecrosforte said:
Also stating that parent 2 has to make their kid "live, eat, and breathe Calc" is extraneous and it assumes that kids can't learn things without some overseer feeding them the knowledge. If you've watched a very young child study bugs or flowers, you see that they have intense focus and patience which are qualities that normally serve them well in the future when they study. But as they get older and indoctrinated in a largely-Prussian-style schooling system that forces them into rows of lectures, this patience, curiosity, and focus goes away. This is especially true for boys who get "diagnosed" with ADHD, aka. boring, tenured teachers need to get fired disease. I do not accept the idea that a child is a passive vessel that will not assimilate the surroundings unless fed the information.
Click to expand...

Saying that the parent makes the kid live, eat, breathe Calc does not inherently mean the child cannot learn. The exact opposite is what I was actually stating. The child is capable, just as the other, but he is being nourished, exploration being facilitated, and a wider depth of knowledge is attained which make the task easier to perform. The attitude of the parent influences the child, bringing (most times) intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, further improving performance. In your last few sentences you are demonstrating how the curiosity, focus and patience dwindles as a result of their environment, in this case teaching style, yet you hold that parents cannot similarly influence learning positively or negatively haha. The child is not a passive vessel, it is a dynamic being that is constantly sculpted by its environment and experiences (read: the human experience) through assimilation and accommodation. It is not being fed information to regurgitate, it's a dynamic relationship, what stays in is highly dependent on the child's motives and the external influences. Under the age of 18, some of the biggest external influences are the parents and the home.
 
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