Next Step Full Length Exam: good resource early on?

[deleted1079310]

Hey guys! Apologies for the long post.

I am just starting to study for an MCAT retake. To give you a little background, I took the NextStep free diagnostic on 4/12 while I was still in classes and got a 495 (ouch, I know). I began studying full time on May 4th using a new study method once my classes were finished. Last Friday 5/14, i took NS FL1 and got a 505.

I had only been studying about a week and saw a 10 point jump. This isn't terribly crazy considering I took the real thing a year ago and did semi-decent (506), so a week of refreshing material is obviously going to help my score a lot. In addition, I have been working on my masters degree for a year and the material I learned is very relevant to the MCAT; however, I am hesitant to believe it is representative of where I would be if I took the AAMC FL right now. The correct percentages seem waaaaaaaay off and the content seemed extremely difficult, to the point where I am hesitant to think I would've even scored a 501-502 on the AAMC FL.

That being said, I still have a long way to go before I take the real thing on 7/30 (roughly 2.5 months away). I was told that NS exams were a great representation of AAMC material which is why I bought the bundle of 4 exams. I was planning to take NS2 in 3 weeks to see if the percentages and score make a big improvement. I took the AAMC FL's last Feb/March before I took the real one, so I don't even know if I could use their FL's for accurate measures of my score either.

My questions are: should I keep taking NS FL's even though I think the score may be inflated (at least at the lower bounds)? Do I have enough time to bring this up to a competitive MCAT for my application?

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[Blueprint Med School]

Take NS scores with a grain of salt- use them to understand pacing on the exam and to learn concepts, but don't pay too much attention to the score. Only the AAMC FL exams can be used to gauge your score.

Kevin W, MCAT Tutor
Med School Tutors

 

[deleted1076141]

Full disclosure, back when I was a content developer at NSTP I wrote a lot of the passages/questions on the practice exams. So obviously I'm biased.

But that said, I'd stand by them as being among the better third party resources out there, we really did a ton of research, over the course of years, to nail MCAT style questions and pedagogy. Kevin is right about taking the scores with a grain of salt though: we simply didn't have access to the statistical tools that the AAMC uses to calibrate the MCAT curve, so we have to do our best to guestimate point percentages. As a general rule of thumb, I wouldn't look too much at your score as being a strong predictor of a test day score, however, because we used the same curve for every exam except the first full length, you can get a good gauge of how much you're improving. So, scoring a 510 doesn't necessarily mean you're going to get a 510 on test day, but going from a 505 NSTP score to a 510 NSTP score is, I believe, a pretty good indicator that you're improving at MCAT appropriate skills.

 

[deleted1079310]

Full disclosure, back when I was a content developer at NSTP I wrote a lot of the passages/questions on the practice exams. So obviously I'm biased.

But that said, I'd stand by them as being among the better third party resources out there, we really did a ton of research, over the course of years, to nail MCAT style questions and pedagogy. Kevin is right about taking the scores with a grain of salt though: we simply didn't have access to the statistical tools that the AAMC uses to calibrate the MCAT curve, so we have to do our best to guestimate point percentages. As a general rule of thumb, I wouldn't look too much at your score as being a strong predictor of a test day score, however, because we used the same curve for every exam except the first full length, you can get a good gauge of how much you're improving. So, scoring a 510 doesn't necessarily mean you're going to get a 510 on test day, but going from a 505 NSTP score to a 510 NSTP score is, I believe, a pretty good indicator that you're improving at MCAT appropriate skills.

Thank you very much for this insight! Obviously, I improved from the diagnostic to full length 1, but if you didn't use the same curve for FL1 as the other FL's, then I will definitely continue to use NS2 and NS3 in order to gauge my progress.