UCSF not requiring MCAT this cycle

[voxveritatisetlucis]

Does anybody else think this underlies a more disturbing trend in higher education? Namely the complete elimination of standardized metrics by which applicants can be compared. It is not just medical school admissions either. STEP1 is pass fail. Most Ivy leave schools are moving towards eliminating SAT/ACT entirely.

Most proponents of eliminating these uniform metrics argue that “rich people have such a huge advantage when it comes to preparation.” I would argue the opposite. When schools move away from objective criteria to subjective measures, it seems as if the wealthy applicants with money to do service trips, expensive extracurriculars, fancy internships due to parental connections have an advantage. When I was in high school I had to work at the local Dunkin Donuts from 3:30 to close. While on the shift (not very busy), I would read through SAT prep books from the library until I got a score that allowed me to get into a school like HYPSM. If not for these tests which supposedly favor the rich, I definitely wouldn’t have been accepted to an Ivy because I didn’t have time to do things like play squash, sail in regattas, or go on service trips on another continent.

tldr: schools should think before uniformly eliminating standardized tests.

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[Lifeblood_20]

In this context, UCSF is making the MCAT optional this year supposedly due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but I guarantee you that most if not all their matriculants will have top-notch MCAT scores anyway. Stanford did the same thing last year and I doubt their applicant pool was short of extraordinary applicants with MCAT scores.

In short, these schools do not require MCAT scores because they want to collect application money from everyone, including those who have not taken the MCAT (and therefore have very little chance at getting in).

 

[darkeon]

If I read the site correctly, it's just not using the mcat to offer interviews but you'll still need to take it no later by September

 

[deleted1025488]

There are many arguments against the MCAT (namely that it has no merit on how good of a physician you'll be) or the unpopular opinion of mine that it's just a terrible nonstandardized exam. But to each their own, the exam is definitely not going away anytime soon and the average MCAT will keep going up and up.

 

[KnightDoc]

If I read the site correctly, it's just not using the mcat to offer interviews but you'll still need to take it no later by September

Actually, the site is contradictory because, while it says that, it also says that "Given the ongoing geographic variation in the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, as per usual all applications will be reviewed by our admissions decision committee holistically regardless of availability of MCAT scores."

The bottom line is that, unlike UG, this is NOT a trend and just doesn't matter for most people. With the SAT, you can decide which schools receive the score, and can withhold crappy scores from test optional schools. You can't do that with the MCAT. If you take it, every school you apply to sees it.

Given how competitive med school admissions are, VERY few people don't take the test and then limit themselves to UCSF, Stanford or whoever isn't requiring it at the moment. As a result, this really isn't a thing yet, and there is no indication any schools have any interest in going MCAT optional once the pandemic is over. To the contrary, it's still probably the single most important metric they use in making admission decisions, given how inflated grades have become and how inherently subjective most other metrics are.

 

[doomer_md]

The year is 2040. All standardized tests have been eliminated. College and higher learning applications only consist of a 23andMe swab, your ancestry.com genealogy, and your childhood zip code to determine how much adversity you overcame.

 

[gonnif]

The question is how do you compare disparate candidates from hundreds of different universities with thousands of different courses by different professors on an academic preparedness basis? This is much more important since the implementation of the Flexner report and its standardization guidelines for premedical education in the early 20th century have eroded to a huge variety of preparatory methods. There have been attempts at standardized testing for premedical students since that time which ultimately developed into the MCAT. From an adcom point of view, there is significant information from both the undergraduate (and graduate) academic record and the MCAT to make that determination. But removing the MCAT would be the only standardized metric available to a medical school.

There have been attempts to even the playing field as some students have resources for more preparation than others by the AAMC. A few years ago it attempted to work with KHAN academy to developed its own free program. But it never could find an agreement internally of how far to go. It also had faced and lost lawsuits in the past over how some prep companies use MCAT. Despite the appearance of a strong centralized organization, it is relatively weak within the medical education professional complex of AMA/LCME/AAMC which must contend with the speciality academies, state medical boards, professional societies, and its own members, both the individual doctors of the AMA, and the medical schools of the AAMC. The politics, the players, the agendas, and the history are fraught with battles being real slogs to an agreement.

 

[LizzyM]

There is a point above which the MCAT loses its predictive value. In other words, you need to hit a threshold above which you are as likely as anyone with a higher test score to do well in med school and gradaute within 5 years (5 years allows for the hot shots to take a research year as well as those who need to remediate and repeat a year -- I do believe that the hot shots greatly outnumber the remediators).

Any guesses as to that number?

The problem is that MCAT score is factored into the formula for school rankings so schools are racing to recruit the high scorers rather than taking the score that predicts that you'll be fine as a floor and consider equally anyone above that threshold. That would make it far more likely that applicants that don't come from circumstances where they can lean on family for financial support while unemployed and studying for the 521 hours it takes to score a 521.




That minimum score number is 500. Did you guess correctly?

 

[KnightDoc]

There is a point above which the MCAT loses its predictive value. In other words, you need to hit a threshold above which you are as likely as anyone with a higher test score to do well in med school and gradaute within 5 years (5 years allows for the hot shots to take a research year as well as those who need to remediate and repeat a year -- I do believe that the hot shots greatly outnumber the remediators).

Any guesses as to that number?

The problem is that MCAT score is factored into the formula for school rankings so schools are racing to recruit the high scorers rather than taking the score that predicts that you'll be fine as a floor and consider equally anyone above that threshold. That would make it far more likely that applicants that don't come from circumstances where they can lean on family for financial support while unemployed and studying for the 521 hours it takes to score a 521.




That minimum score number is 500. Did you guess correctly?

Yup -- I knew that 500 was the cutoff. But, doesn't it also depend on how you define "doing well"?

If it's just graduating, that's one thing. But, at your school for example, don't a lot of the students go on to do great things? And aren't their scores well above 500? And don't people with 520+ disproportionately outperform 505s, even if they all graduate within 5 years, and even if some 520s slack off while some 505s conquer the world? Is the test really useless in predicting performance above 500?

 

[gonnif]

Yup -- I knew that 500 was the cutoff. But, doesn't it also depend on how you define "doing well"?

If it's just graduating, that's one thing. But, at your school for example, don't a lot of the students go on to do great things? And aren't their scores well above 500? And don't people with 520+ disproportionately outperform 505s, even if they all graduate within 5 years, and even if some 520s slack off while some 505s conquer the world? Is the test really useless in predicting performance above 500?

Using MCAT® Data in 2021 Medical Student Selection goes in-depth about the correlation of MCAT performance in medical school, concluding:

Using MCAT total scores together with undergraduate GPAs provides significantly more information about students’ likely performance in their pre-clerkship courses, on the Step 1 exam, and in their clerkship courses compared with using undergraduate GPAs alone.

Personally, I would be curious about those who leave medical school, which is about 3%. However, those who leave due to academic reasons are in the minority of that percentage. would be interesting to see over several cycles the MCAT scores of those who drop out.

 

[LizzyM]

I would love to see the correlation of MCAT with family income (not the student's personal income but family income both earned and passive income from investments.) Controlling for income, how much of a predictor is the MCAT? Money isn't everything but it sure helps a lot!

 

[voxveritatisetlucis]

For what it’s worth, my family made little enough where I got full need based financial aid, no debt and I got 521. I think it’s a crutch.

 

[Goro]

The MCAT is an excellent predictor of academic failure in med school, rather than success, as pointed out by the wise LizzyM.

Preclinical grades are the best predictor of Board scores

 

[deleted1025488]

I would love to see the correlation of MCAT with family income (not the student's personal income but family income both earned and passive income from investments.) Controlling for income, how much of a predictor is the MCAT? Money isn't everything but it sure helps a lot!

There are probably too many factors to consider in the MCAT given the insane spread of information you need to cover. I know I'm just one example, but I scored about 11 points above my practice exam average (515 --> 526) and I'm pretty sure the only reason this happened was that my chemistry section had about 20 questions that were directly related to my research, leaving me almost the entire time for the last 30ish questions, and my biology section was centralized around my undergraduate major focus (endocrinology systems). I was honestly in awe during my exam—these were hard a** questions, not just simple stuff about hormones...but the fact that I had taken those classes made it preschool.

I know this probably doesn't happen very often, but I still find it ridiculous and frankly scary that my test day had an actual, tangible 20 percentile score difference on my performance. I could have tested on the next day or a day with heavy physics and scored a 514 or near my average. In the weeks leading up to my exam, I had been reading that the exam was becoming more 'weedout' via more low yield topics and niche questions...I don't see a reason for that but certainly, believe it now.

 

[CorgiLoaf]

I would love to see the correlation of MCAT with family income (not the student's personal income but family income both earned and passive income from investments.) Controlling for income, how much of a predictor is the MCAT? Money isn't everything but it sure helps a lot!

Since FAP requires parental income to qualify, I think it'll be reasonable to conclude that students who receive FAP are from lower-income families.
From Figure 7:

It'll be more interesting if the data were broken down into different income brackets.

 

[LizzyM]

Since FAP requires parental income to qualify, I think it'll be reasonable to conclude that students who receive FAP are from lower-income families.
From Figure 7: View attachment 339500

It'll be more interesting if the data were broken down into different income brackets.

'thanks for that! It does show a lower mean score and that is despite FAP students qualiftying for some MCAT test prep materials. I'm wondering abotu the applicants who miss the cut off for FAP and who don't have the luxury of taking time off for intensive prep.


And @joe32, I know what you mean about getting lucky with the questilons. I swear I did better than I deserved to on the GRE on a bit of vocabulary I picked up from a candy wrapper.

 

[voxveritatisetlucis]

There are probably too many factors to consider in the MCAT given the insane spread of information you need to cover. I know I'm just one example, but I scored about 11 points above my practice exam average (515 --> 526) and I'm pretty sure the only reason this happened was that my chemistry section had about 20 questions that were directly related to my research, leaving me almost the entire time for the last 30ish questions, and my biology section was centralized around my undergraduate major focus (endocrinology systems). I was honestly in awe during my exam—these were hard a** questions, not just simple stuff about hormones...but the fact that I had taken those classes made it preschool.

I know this probably doesn't happen very often, but I still find it ridiculous and frankly scary that my test day had an actual, tangible 20 percentile score difference on my performance. I could have tested on the next day or a day with heavy physics and scored a 514 or near my average. In the weeks leading up to my exam, I had been reading that the exam was becoming more 'weedout' via more low yield topics and niche questions...I don't see a reason for that but certainly, believe it now.

Probably has to do more with them releasing harder practice tests so people buy more stuff after thinking they are going to get a low score. I was also around 516/517 for practice and 521 on test date. Hopefully gre is same. Taking in july

No.

 

[deleted1025488]

Probably has to do more with them releasing harder practice tests so people buy more stuff after thinking they are going to get a low score. I was also around 516/517 for practice and 521 on test date. Hopefully gre is same. Taking in july

Well, that would mean people spike up on the real exam compared to practices most of the time, which is not the case. Plenty of people have 'bad' test days (i.e. for me it would be a physics-heavy CP or something) that just screw them over.

Like, on my test day CP, there were two organic chemistry synthetic route passages. Both of them in themselves were completely out of scope, but you could extrapolate answers by looking at reaction steps; it was a very difficult passage, but it was a synthetic route—not a common one, to be clear—I performed in lab multiple times as part of my research. This passage (and the other orgo one) not only gave me ~12 free questions but also took me <5 minutes for passages that would have otherwise been very tedious, leaving me waaaay more time for other 'hard' things on CP. Again, 127-8 to 132 here and I feel like without those passages I could have just gotten my average. Hell, if it was a physics passage, I would have probably gotten below my average, as those were the ones I was consistently getting 2-3 wrong on during practice due to my inability in math/physics lol.

I think most people have weaknesses and strengths, and the way the MCAT is structured makes this really significant. In my experience there are usually 3-4 passages that actually will determine your score—the others are usually freebies/'easy passages' that you should be very familiar with. If you get lucky on the hard passages and happen to be familiar with the experimental setup, content, or even the questions themselves, you'll have a huge advantage since 2 questions often = an entire point. I feel like the AAMC tries to design questions in contexts that are really, really unfamiliar (that is, not something you would encounter in actual practice material or the AAMC outline) but many people could end up knowing if they are high up in majors or get really lucky after having read x research paper or taken y class.

If they stuck to the content outline I feel like the exam would be fairer, but I honestly see zero point in trying to test something like an Sn2 reaction in some obscure reaction pathway with 19 steps where you only need to look at 1, or 'made up' scenarios in P/S where test takers have to spend 80% of the time figuring out what on Earth the passage is saying despite actually understanding the content. Also, FL3 and 4 were administered exams and the curves match that, so I don't see how an exam can be standardized when I get 514 and 511 on actual pre administered exams and then a 526 on the real exam. I don't think AAMC deflates those scores.

Like at this point it felt like the AAMC is just evaluating the rigor of your undergrad and making the test artificially hard. Medicine is not something where you need to have some insane ability or theoretical capability like in research. You either know it or you don't. You don't need to be out here synthesizing theories and testing extravagant hypotheses in quantum phenomena where no one knows what is going on especially if you just want to practice.

 

[gyngyn]

Closing.