what's the real mcat like?

[coralfangs]

the tpr guy who came to my club told me that the real things are comparable to recent AAMC

however, my friends and some peers here said that the real deal is a lot harder

so are we expecting a harder test with similar scale? ie. we should expect a few points lower in the real thing?


sorry for these stupid questions, i still don't get how the scaling really works
considering that u have 40,000 people taking every time and they have different test forms available each time
do they compare ur raw score to the overall scores of the day or do they compare ur raw score to all the scores of the past?
or do they have a pre-set scale based on the difficulties of test?

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[NapeSpikes]

No one knows. Some people do a little better, some people do a little worse, most do around the same as practice scores if taken under realistic testing conditions.

Don't worry about all that now, though--it's a waste of time and energy to do so. Just do your best! One week to go! Good luck!

 

[GujuMD]

I took the test in August and I prepared it by using Kaplan and the AAMC materials. The real thing is similar to AAMC. AAMC are older tests. There are different forms. but if the forms have different level of difficulty then the scale is adjusted accordingly.

 

[mdpremed]

as somone who's taken the mcat 3 times, i have a pretty good idea of what the real deal's like, as far as difficulty is concerned. first of all, as a lot of people say, the real thing is usually harder than the AAMC practice tests. i would say that AAMC 8 was a pretty good representation of what a hard MCAT is like. i haven't taken AAMC 9 so i can't comment on that. that being said though, you never know. sometimes you can get a really easy section or sometimes the whole thing is easy. in my case, i took the april 2004, august 2004, and then august 2005 MCAT. April 2004 was really hard (except for bio) and August 2004 was the hardest thing i ever took. So i expected August 2005 to be really, really hard, and it turned out to be much easier than expected (and easier than most of the AAMC tests). so again, my point is, you never know.
as far as score turns out though, it almost always comes very close (if not exactly) to your scores on your AAMC tests. the AAMC tests are by far, the best indicators of how you will do on the real deal.
most importantly, don't panic if you feel like your test is really really hard...almost everyone else will find it hard too, and your score will probably end up being on par with what you've been getting on AAMC tests.

 

[coralfangs]

cool, thx for the info guys


ya, a friend told me that she purely guessed 2 passages in PS in august and still ended up with a 13, i was she was just lying haha