When did you take the MCAT originally?
What were your sub scores?
Are you prepared to retake?
How selective are your state MD schools?
What makes you think you’ll do better on a retake?
Isn’t AAMC FL 4 the most similar to the current MCAT?
The P/S score can be improved. CARS is difficult to improve generally speaking but that 124 will hurt you because it’s below the 50% for that section.
Did you use the Khan Academy 300 page outline to study P/S? How did you prepare for CARS?
To do better you might have to take a course but that would cause a delay in your application.
Without knowing the remainder of your application, it’s hard to know how you’d do in this cycle but based just on your MCAT, you’re probably a borderline MD candidate.
Did you use the Khan Academy 300 page outline to study P/S? How did you prepare for CARS?
To do better you might have to take a course but that would cause a delay in your application.
Without knowing the remainder of your application, it’s hard to know how you’d do in this cycle but based just on your MCAT, you’re probably a borderline MD candidate.
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Kudos for taking all of these practice exams.
Looking at your trend of scores, I would be very wary of re-taking.
Also, reassess your studying strategy. Having taken all of those tests (basically hundreds of similar questions) with little change in score signals that you are not fully understanding the material.
It's better to do fewer questions and really parse the explanations than... doing 1000s by brute force and getting the same result. If you are planning on re-taking as things stand right now, I would say your scores are way too variable-not worth the risk. You should plan on re-taking if you are consistently hitting scores of 515-518+ on practice exams.
Looking at your trend of scores, I would be very wary of re-taking.
Also, reassess your studying strategy. Having taken all of those tests (basically hundreds of similar questions) with little change in score signals that you are not fully understanding the material.
It's better to do fewer questions and really parse the explanations than... doing 1000s by brute force and getting the same result. If you are planning on re-taking as things stand right now, I would say your scores are way too variable-not worth the risk. You should plan on re-taking if you are consistently hitting scores of 515-518+ on practice exams.
If you ever plan on retaking the MCAT with the hopes of obtaining a higher score, that mentality is certainly not going to help you. If you are not able to understand why you got questions wrong after reading the explanations, it's best to ask people for help, tutors, other premeds to help explain concepts you don't understand. This line of thinking is applicable for beyond just the MCAT as the path to medicine is a lifelong series of exams/concepts.
Sure, the passages can be tricky, but having a solid foundation in the concepts will help minimize error and guesses between two close/tricky answer choices.
I'd only recommend retaking it if you can consistently score a 126+ on the CARS section and can significantly improve PS. It's going to be hard to get another 130 on CP. Personally, I was scoring 124s on CARS until I started reading the passages out loud to myself and read the first 3-4 chapters of Kaplan CARS review book. Suddenly my scores were consistently 126+. Obviously this is n=1 but I hope it helps.
No. I just bought the books off amazon, never really did a course. Its a bit silly because everything in the first 3-4 chapters seems like common sense, but for someone who just never read throughout his life (also English is second language) it was quite helpful to give me a different approach to reading the passages.
Off the top of my head, two major tips I took were to slow down my reading during or/but, etc where there's a shift in ideas, and dissecting each paragraph individually while trying to determine the whole tone of the author.
