Old MCAT or New MCAT test?

WayOutWestMom
Sat, 19 Oct 2013 20:28:37 +0000

How do I know these things?

1) I have two kiddos who are either currently in med school or currently applying to med school (So BTDT, and more than once.)

2) I am a librarian (and a biomedical research librarian at that!)–I find answers for a living

3) I know an individual or two who have been on med school admission committees for many years

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RE: coursework

Med school can and do change admission requirements all the time. They have been known to do it at very short notice. (lLike after the application cycle had opened. OSU did just that about 2 years ago.) It’s quite within their rights and perogative to do so. Any institution that can easily fill every one of its available seats multiple times over with qualified candidates can make applicants jump thru whatever hoops they want.

So it doesn’t matter when one graduates from college–it only matters what the admission requirements are at the time of application.

(For the record, both my kiddos had/will have 2 gap years before they started/will start med school. Both understood this meant they need to keep on top of any changes a specific school might invoke.)

RE: which exam?

I honestly don’t what to tell you.

I’d researched this for D2 who decided to apply a year sooner than her original plan just to avoid the 2015 MCAT confusion. AMCAS has changed its collective mind at least 3 times in the past year and a half about what will and will not be allowed.

(Originally AMCAS said that for Fall 2016 and later only the new MCAT would be accepted. The most recent revision says it will be a decision left up to the individual schools.)

My personal opinion is that if there’s any chance the old MCAT will either expire or be not considered—take the new one. I know how much time and effort went into both kiddos prep for the MCAT: hundreds of hours and lots of sacrifices. Both kiddos said, once they’d taken the exam, it’s something they never wanted to have to do again. (Except, of course, they will….the STEP exams are like the MCAT x 1000. Or D1 has told me.) I think it would be quite disheartening to spend all that time preparing, get a good score, and not have it be considered.

Remember that the exams are scale scored–this means that an individual’s scores from the new exam will be dependent on how well/badly their test-taking peers do on the same exam. So the new test—everyone will be on an equal footing about knowing/not know what will be on the exam.

BTW, AMCAS will release prep materials for the new exam to test prep companies in January 2014. Question banks for the new section/subsections have been extensively piloted and refined on students who took the MCAT this year. (D2 took the pilot for biochemistry and stats since she’d taken both classes. State med school already requires biochem. And she was a math major–so stats were trivial for her.)

RE: top med schools (and I detest that term since USNews med school rankings use lousy methodology)

Some top schools (Harvard, Duke and JHU) have already announce different coursework expectations for student entering in fall 2016. Jut a friendly heads up.