The 5/27/2010 MCAT club!

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KatieRedBull

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Hey guys! I don't know if a thread has already been started for the 5/27 MCAT, though I'm pretty sure it hasn't. In any case, I'm popping my thread starting cherry with this one so hopefully I'm doing it right 🙂
I know it's still 5.5 months away, but it's never to early for anything med school related, right? 😀
 
I would not wait that long if you feel good on content review, and it is more of an issue with your test taking skills. So if you feel solid on content but iffy on testing taking skills, retake in about a month and a half. That should give you plenty of time to take practice tests and improve your test-taking skills without the risk of forgetting the information.
 
What date would you guys recommend I register for if I want to take it again?

that depends on how confident you feel, how soon you need your score, and if you really feel like you messed up, how long you realistically need to improve your knowledge/ test taking skills
 
hooray for putting the right answer originally for that enzyme question then changing it to the wrong one :/ oh and realizing i missed one of the easiest ochem questions.. this is gonna be a longgg month..
 
Probably so people like me who are freaking out can chillax and think about it before making a rash decision.

48 hour waiting period on buying guns is designed for obsessive impulsive idiots like me.
 
I am so numb right now.

PS: I did not think it was super easy but not to tricky either
Verbal: Same, Not too easy not too tricky
BS: WTH!!! I just dont get it, time intensive and heavy on mol bio, Should have taken the class.
 
yeah, one of my friends who took the mcat a year ago told me that when he came out, he thought he BOMBED the mcat, and thought it was the end of the whole pre-med thing.. and then when he got his scores back he was surprised how well he did.. he said he did better than any of his practice tests. but then again, he's like a genius, so who knows. i'm just hoping bio will be curved because it seems the general consensus is that it was freaking HARD. we'll see i guess.
 
Pretty much agreed with the majority:

PS : straightfoward, hoping for 13.

VS: Not much diff from normal AAMC. Hoping for 10

BS: Hard... Hoping for 12 zz. I got 13-14 on all my aamc practice bio. But this one I have no confidence in.
I am still mad at the free standing enzyme problem. I am a biochem major too -_-.
 
1) PS: went really smoothly. In terms of difficulty, this section was very similar to AAMC 10 and 8. I felt confident after this section. AAMC range (13-15). Prediction 13+ barring stupid mistakes.

2) Verbal: YES THE PASSAGES ARE LONGER THAN THE AAMC PRACTICES. I don't know what to say here. I finished with 2 minutes remaining. AAMC range (9-12) Prediction: Praying for a 10 here.

3) Bio: Some of the passages were more difficult to understand than AAMC ones. I found myself rereading several passages to answer the questions. AAMC range (13-15) Prediction: I am hoping for a 12+.

Did anyone else have a passage regarding neurodegenerative disease in bio sci? My research is about this stuff. Good bio passage.. I am hoping that its not experimental.

Overall, I felt really confident after PS, and that confidence subsided from verbal to bio. Granted that the night before I got at most 3 hours of sleep, I think I was pretty focused through the exam. Could not fall asleep for anything in the world.
 
1) PS: went really smoothly. In terms of difficulty, this section was very similar to AAMC 10 and 8. I felt confident after this section. AAMC range (13-15). Prediction 13+ barring stupid mistakes.

2) Verbal: YES THE PASSAGES ARE LONGER THAN THE AAMC PRACTICES. I don't know what to say here. I finished with 2 minutes remaining. AAMC range (9-12) Prediction: Praying for a 10 here.

3) Bio: Some of the passages were more difficult to understand than AAMC ones. I found myself rereading several passages to answer the questions. AAMC range (13-15) Prediction: I am hoping for a 12+.

Did anyone else have a passage regarding neurodegenerative disease in bio sci? My research is about this stuff. Good bio passage.. I am hoping that its not experimental.

Overall, I felt really confident after PS, and that confidence subsided from verbal to bio. Granted that the night before I got at most 3 hours of sleep, I think I was pretty focused through the exam. Could not fall asleep for anything in the world.

I had that passage. Wow how do u function with 3 hrs of sleep. I need like 9-10 hours for maximum concentration. Otherwise I start falling asleep while reading verbal lol.
 
Just got back from a 4 hour Ohio drive -.- postponed my April date so that was the best loc I could get... Anyways:

PS: I felt like it was mostly really simple; I would say probably 45/52 questions were common sense. The other questions were ambiguous and not really indicative of an understanding of physical sciences (I didn't think it was possible to hate my computer printer any more that I did). Overall, I'll be upset if I don't own this section, but I could see how 1 or 2 questions could easily bump me down 1-2 points.

VR: II was ridiculous - I couldn't really make anything of it and I read through it a second time quickly to see if I missed anything major and still had no idea wtf it was about. The other passages were pretty simple and straight-forward but I thought that the questions overall were a little more ambiguous than the AAMCs. Even on the hard verbal AAMCs I didn't find myself second guessing my answers, but I did that at least 6-7 times on this exam. Overall, I hope I pulled a 10, but I have really no idea. This will be the downfall of my exam, if I have one 😉 :xf:

BS: I've had so many classes in microbio and molecular genetics that this stuff has been etched into my brain, so I found it relatively easy. It took a while to finish (normally have at least 20 min left), but I only had about 10 min at the end to look over the ones I had marked. Couple discrete physio questions that I just didn't know because I haven't had physio 👎 but otherwise, I justified all of my answers. It was HEAVY genetics and molecular biology - even if the passage wasn't 100% about them, you had to understand the cellular implications of the disease/topic to be able to get the questions right.

Help me remember the other 2 verbal passages:
II - can't even come up with a general idea lol..
conservation bio
hydrocarbons
human implication in nature
red tree

The great thing is that my internship starts on Tuesday, so I have **** to keep me busy while I wait for this score. I was a 37.6 average on my AAMCs and I feel like I could get anywhere from a 33-40. Hopefully I guessed well!
 
fear conditioning
oscillating viewpoints in philosophy
opera
conserv bio
hydrocarbs
red tree
human language vs animal
 
Maybe that extra hard verbal is an experimental unless the person above me is a verbal guru. The peeing/drinking one was kinda silly....
 
I know I didn't skip anything but I don't remember an opera one.. haha I am drawing a complete blank.
 
did anyone else who took the test today not only feel like bio was hard but that they had no time to check over their answers? I feel like I could have made so many careless mistakes in my rush to finish on time that I didn't get to fix cause I only got to look over like half of the ones I had marked. 😡
 
i definitely feel like that. I usually have ~15 min to look over bio but i only had ~3minutes today.
PS and VR gave me no surprises.
But BS made me uncomfortable. Not enough o.chem and the I thought the bio questions were much more difficult than the practice AAMCs. Also, there were fewer questions that required textbook knowledge, most of the bio questions were structured more like verbal reasoning questions...
 
fear conditioning
oscillating viewpoints in philosophy
opera
conserv bio
hydrocarbs
red tree
human language vs animal
AH, I remember now. If this is the hard one, I guess I did have it. Must have blocked it from my memory.
 
Does anyone recall what topics were covered in the Physical and Biological portions of the exam today?
 
im still dieing to know what that 7th passage was in verbal - i did have the fear conditioning one - i forgot about that 1
 
I know I didn't skip anything but I don't remember an opera one.. haha I am drawing a complete blank.

yeah i didnt have an opera one either.. at first i was freaking out for a sec, so im glad others didnt have this passage either. maybe there are experimental verbal passages?
 
did anyone else who took the test today not only feel like bio was hard but that they had no time to check over their answers? I feel like I could have made so many careless mistakes in my rush to finish on time that I didn't get to fix cause I only got to look over like half of the ones I had marked. 😡

YES!!! That was exactly how I felt at the end. There were a lot of questions where I rushed through to finish on schedule with the idea that I'd go back and look at them longer at the end, and just didn't have time to....
 
I feel like I am gonna be made or broken by the VR section. Definitely my weakest area. Do you guys think that the VR was easy? I thought it was hard and I have to rush through the last passage. PS and BS are alright nothing too scary.
 
why cant they give us a score right away like the practice tests? What's the deal with this enzyme q? "ilovemcat" PS was all over, no detailed calcs though. Verbal seemed easy...longer than on prac tests but only a few tricky questions if you could stay interested. Bio was a joke. Really, I'm waiting for a belated april fools email. It simply wasn't fair. Questions were fair, but the passages were so complex reading one of them took forever...and they just kept coming...nothing straightforaward in bio...just get an idea of whats going on and take a shot at an answer...sure you could figure it out...but do you really have time? No, especially not when you have 4 other passages lined up waiting to rape you
 
had:
opera

didn't have
peeing/drinking
this enzyme question..wtf? did i miss it? What was it about?
 
why cant they give us a score right away like the practice tests? What's the deal with this enzyme q? "ilovemcat" PS was all over, no detailed calcs though. Verbal seemed easy...longer than on prac tests but only a few tricky questions if you could stay interested. Bio was a joke. Really, I'm waiting for a belated april fools email. It simply wasn't fair. Questions were fair, but the passages were so complex reading one of them took forever...and they just kept coming...nothing straightforaward in bio...just get an idea of whats going on and take a shot at an answer...sure you could figure it out...but do you really have time? No, especially not when you have 4 other passages lined up waiting to rape you

agree with everything you said about bio. like, i feel utterly massacred. It was all I could do to understand what the passages were saying let alone answer the questions. Im so overwhelmed by that that I can't even recall how I felt about PS. eff this. lol
 
why cant they give us a score right away like the practice tests? What's the deal with this enzyme q? "ilovemcat" PS was all over, no detailed calcs though. Verbal seemed easy...longer than on prac tests but only a few tricky questions if you could stay interested. Bio was a joke. Really, I'm waiting for a belated april fools email. It simply wasn't fair. Questions were fair, but the passages were so complex reading one of them took forever...and they just kept coming...nothing straightforaward in bio...just get an idea of whats going on and take a shot at an answer...sure you could figure it out...but do you really have time? No, especially not when you have 4 other passages lined up waiting to rape you

HAHA, wow, today was one of the most demoralizing days of my life...that being said, the above description of the bio section feels painfully accurate. I feel like there were not one, but two immunology passages, this test seemed really immunology focused. I was also way too nervous during PS though, so I kind of freaked when I got to the spray can question, and it was sort of downhill from there because I was too panicky. I also got the opera passage.
 
It's okay, just ignore me everyone. I don't exist.

I'm sorry but posts often get overlooked here with how many people post after you before someone reads the thread. on top of that, it IS the day of our MCAT...we are allowed to talk amongst one another regarding how we felt to help ease the anxiety, and on top of THAT, we can't tell you specifics about what was tested regardless. Do what we all did and just study everything--there's no way to know what will be thrown at you (unfortunately) and you might get a test that plays to your strengths, or not, or one like ours that has a section brutal for everyone.
 
I was a cell bio/microbio major and even I thought the BS passages were too long and time consuming, though I didn't have too much trouble understanding them. I'm not that strong in orgo so I was sort of glad that there was minimal orgo only. PS was pretty straightforward I think, though I barely finished on time. VR- I didn't have the opera AND the pissing passages...strange....the second passage was hard as hell for sure, but the questions were not as convoluted I thought.
 
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