Will the AAMC assessments interfere with the old AAMC MCAT practice tests?

[Ash366]

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When I bought MCAT materials from a friend he also gave me old AAMC MCAT exams. I heard that the assessments contain verbal passages from AAMC exam number 6. I'm just afraid that the assessments might be passages that got removed from the old AAMC EXAMS.

I was thinking of doing all of the assessments then take all of the AAMC practice exams but what if a couple of passages from the verbal, physical or bio assessments are on the AAMC practice exams? I won't be able to grade myself accurately. What do you recommend? Thank you.

 

[NextStepTutor_3]

Do you have the regular AAMC exams or the "R" ones? (The R tests are longer than the current MCAT with about 10 passages per section). The self-assessments definitely reuse passages from AAMC 6 as well as most of the "extra" passages from the R exams.

On the other hand, if you have the regular-length AAMCs, the current ones (3, 4, 5 and 7-11) don't repeat any passages!

 

[Ash366]

Yes they are R exams and much longer. To prevent from running into the same questions from the self assessment, I should stick to the original 3,4,5, 7-11?

The main concern is this: When I took the self assessment, there was one question that was bothering me so I quickly reviewed the answer and moved on. Now sadly, when I took my real AAMC exam, that SAME question was on the exam, just the numbers were changed. Yet I got that wrong.

Now the reason why I wanted to work on old AAMC FLs is because what If there are questions that are on that, that are not on the shorter FLs as well as assessments but ends up being on the real exam?

 

[NextStepTutor_3]

Oh, they used the same question on your official test? That does make some sense - although you should never see the same question word for word, there's only so many concepts they can test and ways to test them.

However, you should be 100% safe using only the current FLs and self-assessments. From what I've seen, the longer AAMCs contain very few "unique" passages (ones that aren't on either of those other sources). However, if you want to be safe, why not spend a day or so during the week before your test looking over the PDFs of those old tests? That way you don't have to spend time "retaking" them (since they're less representative anyway due to the length), but you should be able to spot anything that looks totally unfamiliar and might be a good question to know.

 

[Ash366]

Yes I was thinking of doing that. Thank you for your help 🙂