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<p>Oh I have heard these too, of course. And while I would agree there may be more pre-med than say pre-law, I do not think the use of the term is because of frequency. Most students I know who want to eventually be lawyers tend not to use the term pre-law. Same for dentistry and so forth. Yet every student I know who wants to be a doctor says pre-med.</p>
<p>An old study cites a strong correlation between SAT and MCAT scores.
See [Sat</a> and Mcat score correlation : Medical Education Discussions](<a href=“http://www.medical-education.us/sat-and-mcat-score-correlation-t141.html]Sat”>http://www.medical-education.us/sat-and-mcat-score-correlation-t141.html)</p>
<p>For a period of time around 1985, Hopkins Medical School accepted SAT scores as part of its evaluation of medical school applicants. (I’ll try to find a reference.)</p>
<p>Those MCATs must be awful important for med school admissions. Neighbor girl graduated with a 3.9 in biomedical engineering from large neighoring state school, had major research experience durings summers in NY and Iowa, worked in hospital setting during school years, has been published due to research and she didn’t get in to med school the past two years. Her MCATs were “average”, not low but not high. Good enough to be considered but not good enough to get in. She has now been accepted at a college of osteopathic medicine and is happy that her medical career will happen. Her ACT was 30+.</p>
<p>MCATs are super important. I think med schools would be more likely to consider someone with a lower GPA (depending how hard the undergrad school was) and higher MCAT scores than the reverse.</p>
<p>A couple people I know who were accepted to med school had SAT/ACT scores around 1400/32 ish (95+ percentile?) One was a NMF. Their MCAT scores were around 50th percentile for accepted students. (Their math/science grades in college were quite good–3.8-3.9ish) Students go from being at the very top of the heap–then they’re thrown in with all those other top students–and suddenly they’re just in the middle of the pack. There are a lot of smart docs out there who barely passed their boards and graduated in the bottom 10% of their med school classes, too.</p>
<p>A doc I know had an ACT score of 27 (before prep was a big deal). Kinda surprised it was that low. </p>
<p>I started the thread on the med school forum. IMO, students who got below 25-26 ACT would be unlikely to survive the curriculum with a decent GPA. And it is unlikely they could get a decent enough MCAT score to get in. 24 ACT and under? I don’t think it is possible. I’d like to hear if anyone did it. Even under 28-29 is a long shot. Anyone can call themselves pre-med, but many of those students are dreaming.</p>
<p>There are several new medical schools opening soon (and a few opened last year)–so it might get slightly less competitive in the next few years.</p>
<p>*
A doc I know had an ACT score of 27 (before prep was a big deal). Kinda surprised it was that low. *</p>
<p>I, too, know of a doctor with a 27 ACT, but he’s in his late 50s and that was long before test prep was a big deal. In those days it was “one and done” - so he may have just had a bad test day or just didn’t do well in a particular section.</p>
<p>*IMO, students who got below 25-26 ACT would be unlikely to survive the curriculum with a decent GPA. *</p>
<p>I agree! The exceptions might be the kids who are strong in math and science sections and may just have been lousy in the English and/or CR sections. Perhaps English wasn’t their primary language or the primary language spoken in the home. That can affect English and CR scores.</p>
<p>Those MCATs must be awful important for med school admissions.</p>
<p>They must be.</p>
<p>My H’s niece went to a very pricey LAC for her pre-med program (borrowed WAY TOO much money for it) with the idea that she’s going to be a doctor and pay it all back. Well, she got good grades, but an average MCAT. No acceptances to med school. </p>
<p>She probably made the mistake of not applying to any “lower tier” med schools, and she will try again. </p>
<p>BTW…what is the approx number of med schools a student should apply to? 6? 8? more? less? What???</p>
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THe statistics are all listed here. There’s lots of detail on these sheets.</p>
<p>[FACTS:</a> Applicants, Matriculants, Graduates, and Residency Applicants - Data - AAMC](<a href=“http://www.aamc.org/data/facts/]FACTS:”>http://www.aamc.org/data/facts/)</p>
<p>The MCAT is very important, but that is taken when kids are 21 or 22, not 16 or 17. Things can change. And like I said, the test is very different than the SAT Reasoning test. If there is a correlation between SAT and MCAT scores I suspect it is because serious students in high school are often serious students in college. But some kids are late bloomers. </p>
<p>It may be easy to buffalo your way to good grades in high school, it is a lot harder in a rigorous science program at a college. I personally think that from what I see on sample tests, the MCAT is not as hard as the classwork. Kids will get weeded out in the classes. There’s no reason to program your life based on a test you take high school junior year.</p>
<p>I would repeat menloparkmom’s suggestion that you go to the Pre-Med Topics forum and do as Search for SAT as similar questions have been asked before and post your specific question. There are several regular posters there, including current Med school students, who are extremely knowledgeable and helpful.</p>
<p>Professors sometimes point out that there is no such major as “pre-med.” You’re a bio or chem major, or even English, History, or Music, until you get accepted to medical school.</p>
<p>(Oh, unless you’re in a 7 year pre-accepted UG/Med school program.)</p>
<p>And I recall being sometimes annoyed by the better-than-thou attitude of “pre-med” majors. ;)</p>
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<p>I went to a UCLA roadshow for accepted students at which one current UCLA medical student (who had gone to UCLA undergrad) was a member of a panel. He said that a student should have a war chest of 8-10 thousand dollars to apply to medical school…$3,000 for application fees ($100 times 20-30 medical school applications) and 5-7 thousand dollars to travel to interviews that you would hopefully get. I was pretty shocked.</p>
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<p>Interesting table.</p>
<p>If your MCAT is 33-35, you need 3.8+ GPA to have a 90% chance of admission if you are ‘White’ or ‘Asian’.</p>
<p>If you are ‘Black’ with that same MCAT score, you only need 3.2-3.4 GPA to have a 93% chance of admission.</p>
<p>With that 33-35 MCAT and a 3.2-3.4 GPA, if you are ‘Asian’ your chance is 51%, and ‘White’ it is 58%.</p>
<p>Back to OP, there is no correlation between ACT / SAT and MCAT. ACT / SAT are very easy, primary based on Junior High material, MCAT is extremely hard and detailed and very best do not do well on their first diagnostic practice tests at all. </p>
<p>There is huge correlation between praparation and ACT / SAT score and much more so is true for MCAT. I imagine that it is impossible to get reasonable MCAT score without preparation. So, conclusion is that any ACT / SAT is ok for pre-med. Just get your college GPA as high as possible, prepare for MCAT, get it as close to 35 as possible and you will be just fine.</p>
<p>The FACT sheets linked in post #47 should be required reading–shows students what is realistic. I think 6-8 carefully chosen med schools ought to be enough if some “safeties”
(lower ranked, less selective schools) are included.</p>
<p>The outliers on this chart really intrigue me. Who are those (extremely rare) students with both bad grades and really low MCAT scores who got accepted anyway? What was it that convinced at least one admissions committee that they deserved a chance?
AND who are those few students with both top grades and through-the-roof scores who were rejected? Did they have criminal records? Really horrible interviews?</p>
<p>Hi, I’m a 50ish physician, so take my thoughts with a grain of salt, they are a bit out of date!</p>
<p>1) ACT and MCAT - the ACT is probably a better predictor of MCAT than SAT overall, because it is a content test. Although, the SAT does measure logical thinking, which is always helpful in test-taking.</p>
<p>2) Old ACT scores - I think I made about a 30 on the ACT, but the scores have been recentered since then, and I think an old 30 is somewhere around a 34 now? Anyone know?</p>
<p>3) “Bad test-takers” will have a hard time in med school, no matter how hard they study. Frankly they may not make the best doctors, especially MDs that have to make rapid decisions. It is hard to explain, but the ability to think logically, orderly and with a certain amount of intuition (which is often the logical orderly arrangement of facts just going on subconsciously in the background) in a high pressure situation is a really useful skill for a doc to have. Think of the ER doc with the unconscious gunshot wound patient.</p>
<p>4) English - there is an essay on the MCAT now, if I’m not mistaken, and even back in the day I took extra English classes. I had clepped all but one semester of English required for my major, but the med school admissions folks felt that actually taking an Emglish composition class was important - I took advanced Eng Compos. Those of you thinking you may get out of it, should check with the advisors.</p>
<p>5) Importance of organic - no other class is a better predictor of success in med school. the skills that help you do well in organic hold you in good stead in med school. Very few courses offer the combination of memorizing, lab work and then critical thinking (synthesis).</p>
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<p>I never took the ACT, but I did tutor some students on it. I don’t believe it is a content test. Even the Science section is more like a combination of critical reading, logic, and a tiny bit of math. You really don’t need to know much, if any science to do well on that section. And I believe they purposefully set it up that way.</p>
<p>SAT 2 in Chemistry, Physics, Biology, or Math are content based tests, as are AP exams.</p>
<p>Oh, and did I mention test-taking is REALLY important…just kidding, sort of. Med school is one longgrind of standardized tests, can anyone say Type K questions?
I know a couple of people who are community members of our local med school’s admission committee, and they do a difficult and thankless job for which they get no remuneration (just meals while reading apps and doing interviews). Most of their applicants are highly qualified, and they are very conscious of trying to predict who is going to be successful in med school, in some ways, unfortunately, that is more important than who would make a good doctor. From their perspective, the spots are in too short a supply to use on someone who really, really wants to be a doc, but hasn’t demonstrated that they will succeed academically.
Remember that almost everyone who enters medical school graduates. It is front end gated.</p>
<p>Let me correct that bovertine, the Science section has some content, but it is relatively basic chemistry and biology (I had never had chemistry or physics when I took the ACT way back when, I was self-taught, but I did pretty well on the science, it was just common sense to me) and the rest is critical thinking. The grammar is content, and math obviously. The SAT, however is less of a content test - not the SAT IIs.
MCAT is almost all content.</p>
<p>^^^
Yes, I should have been more clear. It has minimal, or rudimentary science content is a more accurate statement.</p>
<p>When you took the MCAT did it have history, and art and stuff like that? I am of a similar age to you, and I remember my pre-med classmates having to be sort of Renaissance people to take that test.</p>
<p>For some students, there may not be a direct correlation between how they did on the SAT/ACT and how they do later.</p>
<p>I had VERY mediocre SAT scores (back in the dark ages). When I took the LSAT and GRE, I was in the 98% percentile. I was a bit older than the average student when I took the LSAT and GRE (I had dropped out for 3 years) but, for me, the difference was that I drifted through high school and when I went back to college, I was motivated and learned a thing or 2. I approached the LSAT and GRE as I approached my studies and the results were dramatically different than the SAT.</p>
<p>atomom, one of my college boyfriends (summa cum laude Harvard, great MCATs) was rejected from every med school he applied to back in the day. What he did wrong was have an argument (not serious he thought) about the AMA with the person who was going to write his main recommendation. He ended up going to grad school in chemistry, dropped that after a year, spent a year working in a hospital and reapplied with recommendations from the doctors he worked with. He’s a radiologist today. 
I think the seasoning and humbling was probably good for him.</p>