<p>If bad grades are the weak point on your application, you make up for it somewhere else: Work experience, other post-grad degrees, more volunteering, etc. If you sit and do nothing to improve your app. before the next cycle, yeah, you will likely get bounced again, but most people continue to strengthen their application. </p>
<p>Efficient how, though? All the spots are filled each year, so it’s inefficient for the person who doesn’t get in, but society still gets a doctor. Whether the person who gets that spot is the best choice is totally subjective. What a super MCAT would do is help out people who are excellent students the afternoon they take the test. Maybe the new system should require two MCAT tests on successive years, to show a degree of consistency. </p>
<p>We have practicing MDs come in for lecture all the time and explain that some of the stuff we learn the first couple years is ONLY for the boards, and that we won’t need to have it readily available from memory. It’s important that you knew it at one point. A practicing MD will not do as well on their boards as they did at the end of their second year. The facts are floating around somewhere, though, so that if one of those one in a million cases comes along, it gives you a tickling in the back of your brain that you’ve seen something before.</p>
<p>Testing for relevant knowledge sounds great, but I think it would be like having tryouts for a track team. Two kids run a race in the same time, but one has terrible form, and the other has been coached extensively beforehand. Having one super MCAT will likely go the same way as the SAT did- originally provide a measure of equality, but one that lessens down the road. People will start to take prep courses, etc. which gives an advantage to people that can afford them. I’m not sure whether one giant standardized test will improve efficiency, or just move it around.</p>