Poll for previous takers...

[Hastur]

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So I'm curious now as to whether this is a strong correlation or just a random factor. Poking back through the "30+ MCAT Study Habits" thread after posting my own irreverent how-I-did-it for my 37R (which contained a lot of "I'd like to thank my arts degrees for teaching me to think laterally") I noticed someone had reposted/replied to this entry from 2008:
http://forums.studentdoctor.net/showthread.php?p=6695902#post6695902

...from Vihasdas, with a 40S, who stresses intuitive thinking, treating the biological sciences section as if it's verbal reasoning (a strategy I believe also contributed heavily to my 13 BS score, though I didn't know anyone else did this until now) and approaching things in terms of "why" questions and "what is the test maker thinking". This person also started off with a music degree!

I've heard this kind of story from a couple of other people and I'm wondering if we're outliers among high scorers (that is, if most of the high scorers did not study humanities) or whether we're high scorers because we're outliers. So, poll must follow. Please select one of the categories so we can figure out whether liberal arts degrees really are the magic bullet or just a random factor.

(ETA:

Arts and humanities includes any and all creative arts ("serious personal study" includes "I play the guitar every weekend"), language arts, and to a large extent social science disciplines because they teach thinking from a verbal angle rather than a mathematical one.

The poll categories are mostly high score categories, because I'm trying to examine outliers, but I need low scorers too for a control group! If my control group is full of arts majors, I'll know this is spurious. I drew somewhat arbitrary lines at various percentile marks. "25 to 30" should say "25 to 29", I had a derp moment while editing the poll options.)

 

[Altair89]

So I'm curious now as to whether this is a strong correlation or just a random factor. Poking back through the "30+ MCAT Study Habits" thread after posting my own irreverent how-I-did-it for my 37R (which contained a lot of "I'd like to thank my arts degrees for teaching me to think laterally") I noticed someone had reposted/replied to this entry from 2008:
http://forums.studentdoctor.net/showthread.php?p=6695902#post6695902

...from Vihasdas, with a 40S, who stresses intuitive thinking, treating the biological sciences section as if it's verbal reasoning (a strategy I believe also contributed heavily to my 13 BS score, though I didn't know anyone else did this until now) and approaching things in terms of "why" questions and "what is the test maker thinking". This person also started off with a music degree!

I've heard this kind of story from a couple of other people and I'm wondering if we're outliers among high scorers (that is, if most of the high scorers did not study humanities) or whether we're high scorers because we're outliers. So, poll must follow. Please select one of the categories so we can figure out whether liberal arts degrees really are the magic bullet or just a random factor.

(ETA:

Arts and humanities includes any and all creative arts ("serious personal study" includes "I play the guitar every weekend"), language arts, and to a large extent social science disciplines because they teach thinking from a verbal angle rather than a mathematical one.

The poll categories are mostly high score categories, because I'm trying to examine outliers, but I need low scorers too for a control group! If my control group is full of arts majors, I'll know this is spurious. I drew somewhat arbitrary lines at various percentile marks. "25 to 30" should say "25 to 29", I had a derp moment while editing the poll options.)

Interesting poll, but I think their are way too many options to choose from in order to get an idea of the correlations you suggested.

 

[Hastur]

Ehh? Fewer options would make it less possible to find a correlation. You can always bin data later, when running the statistics, but assuming narrow bins in advance, you can't later tease out things like, for instance, if there were a lot of arts majors who got very high or very low scores but fewer in the middle.

 

[PingPongPro]

This thread is kind of pointless.

If you are really interested, there is a breakdown in "The Official Guide to the MCAT EXAM" book.

Physical Sciences = Avg 29.2
Math and Stats = 29
Humanities= 28.7
Social Sciences= 27.2
Biological Sciences = 27.1
All majors= 27.3

There is more data that you can look up if you are interested.

I think the score distribution is not because certain majors prepare you better for a certain way of thinking. It is more likely a result of the type of people that choose non science majors that also choose to pursue med school. These people are probably more informed and proactive about researching the pre-med process which relates to a higher score. Also it is more likely that people who are weaker or less interested in liberal arts will stray away from these majors. This makes it more plausible that their verbal scores are lower than someone who is more actively interested in liberal arts. In the end its all just a selection bias that accounts for any score differences between majors, and not the major content itself. Also considering that the sample sizes are so small for some majors, that it is pretty statistically irrelevant.

 

[Hastur]

Yes, I have seen those stats. They don't give percentages for the outlier scores, and I'm also interested in the correlation (or lack thereof!) of personal arts/humanities study and high MCAT scores. It would help if more low scorers answered, though!