You must harbor a very special disdain for the people who took the old MCAT after taking like 20 full length practice exams. I know you already said the testing conditions are "radically different" which might be true in the sense that the environment is different but the content and arrangement of the exam is the same as in a practice test. What else would practice tests exist for if not to practice.
I'm going to disagree with
@efle. The argument about why voiding exists is not "fun", it is stupid. Voiding exists because sometimes **** can go wrong on test day or you can freak out because it is a high stress situation that can depend on many variables like the power going out, technical difficulties, and other variables that can affect people's performance differently. Voiding exists so that these people can have an out if they feel their performance was not going to be their best on test day and they understand that their score is very important. The reason you can't see your score is to prevent an advantage but not the exceedingly ridiculous one you made up with no evidence, it is to prevent rich applicants from, in situations where officia practice exams are scarce (such as the current MCAT ecosystem), using the void feature as a sort of Practise Exam plus.
The AAMC is not going out of their way to prevent people from scoring in the top percentiles. They are going out of their way to prevent people from abusing a system.
Also, your criticism of the AAMC data does not hold I think because the sample sizes for their statistics are so large random variation can probably be thrown out. It is far simpler, and yes it is Occam's razor, to make efle's claim that previous scores attempts do not significantly impact the magnitude of an applicant's retake score.
Another good place to look is what the AAMC has to say about how multiple mcats are considered. Remember the AAMC releases a report every year advising applicants on how to use MCAT data in admissions and they maintain a survey of adcoms to keep a finger on the pulse of what is actually going on.
If the claim you make is true -- a significant increase in score is not impressive given that another exam was already taken and scored prior to it and that presents a distinct advantage -- then we should expect adcoms to view very significant increases with indifference or scepticism.
From the AAMC MCAT FAQ:
How are multiple MCAT scores used?
According to a survey of medical school admissions officers, schools use multiple sets of MCAT scores in several ways:
- Some schools weigh all sets of scores equally and note improvements.
- Other schools consider only the most recent set of scores.
- Still others take an average of all sets of scores.
- Some schools use only the highest set of scores or the highest individual sections scores.
Yet we don't see that. Nowhere does it list the possibility of a second score somehow being worth less than the first. The reason SDN advises not to retake a good score is because it demonstrates a possible character flaw to some adcoms (ppl at Stritch probably wouldn't like it, Penn would probably be like "meh we get it dude you wanted to come here"). Multiple scores are either weighted equally, averaged together, or the highest is chosen. Adcoms do not discriminate based on which exam was first or second. Because that would be stupid.
So you can either continue on this absurd logic supported by nothing other than your own conviction or you can believe the far simpler explanation about voiding actually supported by multiple sources of data and consistent with the AAMCs voiding policy.
