Get the Score: Inside the New MCAT Practice Exam

Get the Score: Inside the New MCAT Practice Exam

By: MedSchoolCoach’s Sam Smith and Alex Starks

Sam Smith, the host of the MCAT Basics podcast, sat down with Alex Starks, one of the creators of the MedSchoolCoach MCAT Practice Exam, to see what went into the making of one of the world’s best MCAT practice exams.

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For a limited time, #LifeofaMedStudent readers can take the MCAT Practice Exam for free. Use Partner ID code LIFEOFAMEDSTUDENT at checkout!

A pre-med student’s MCAT score can make or break their chances of getting into med school – and only about 42% of exam takers are accepted into medical school each year. MedSchoolCoach recently launched an incredibly realistic MCAT practice exam that emulates the official AAMC exam. It is designed to help students prepare and get detailed analytics on how they can improve their score on test day.

The MCAT is the standardized exam used to assess not only a student’s knowledge of scientific concepts and principles, but also their ability to problem solve and think critically. Since admission committees use a student’s exam score as a primary criteria of acceptance, a handful of organizations have created MCAT practice exams to help students hone their skills.

Sam Smith, MCAT Basics: 

I know from hosting my MCAT Basics podcast that there are a million MCAT practice tests out there. What sets the MedSchoolCoach MCAT Practice Exam apart from all the other ones?

Alex Starks, Associate Director of MCAT, MedSchoolCoach:

That is a fantastic question. What sets our practice exams apart is the intense amount of background research and effort that went into designing them. We spent substantial time studying the AAMC material, using it as our bible, and learned how to emulate it – all the way down to word and character count in the science sections. This way, we could replicate the amount of time students would be reading in each passage, and how long they would be spending deciphering questions and analyzing answer choices. We controlled for every detail and variable, and that makes our exams quite unique.

Sam:

What was your role like in the development of the MCAT practice exam?

Alex:

My role was primarily editing the passages and questions that the content team created. I had the opportunity to write some passages and questions too, but most of my role was making sure it looked and felt like the actual MCAT exam students see on test day.

Sam:

How does one write a passage for an MCAT question? This is something I’ve always wondered, as these passages have so much information.

Alex:

I will say the process is a lot of fun. That might be my nerdy part coming out, but it really is. In short, we find a research article or piece of English writing for CARS, and write MCAT-style questions about it. Of course, there are licensing considerations you have to pay attention to since the passages come from somebody else’s research. So you need to assure the content is something you’re allowed to edit and use for commercial purposes. But after that, you just find a topic that you find interesting and edit down the information into paragraphs, create the graphs to match the source material, and write the questions. I’m making it sound really simple, but it is essentially that process. You just need to assure each question consists of something that will help students with analyzing graphs and data to test and measure their understanding of a subject.

Sam:

Is there something you do to make passages sound like they are authentically AAMC? Because, when you’re reading a passage, it doesn’t read just like a research article. So, what are some of the things that are different about a research article versus an AAMC passage? 

Alex:

The number one thing that is different between an actual research article that you would have to read in class versus an AAMC passage is that the AAMC deletes stuff out of the article that makes it makes sense….And then they ask you a question about it.  The only other major difference is changing the tone the article is written in to something a little easier to digest quickly. 

Sam:

What about CARS? The Critical Analysis and Reasoning section is designed to test your ability to read a passage, interpret the information, and answer questions about the passage. Are CARS questions made the same way? Those to me seem like they’d be extremely difficult to write.

Alex:

Yeah. Bad CARS questions are easy to write, but good CARS questions are very hard to write. A good CARS section emulates the sort of logic that the AAMC asks without giving things away. Anybody could write questions that copy the AAMC. But then if you were a student, once you get to the AAMC material, you’d be like: “Oh, man, I saw this on this third-party exam, what a waste of time.” That’s not good. That’s not what anybody wants. For CARS, really understanding the logic of the AAMC is critical.

In terms of writing the passages for our first exam, I wanted something about music and had trouble finding a good source, so I wrote one from scratch about jazz because I happen to know a lot about jazz. Writing it was hard because if I had my way, I’d write a novel, and not a 575 word count essay, but thankfully, there are hundreds of AAMC CARS passages that you can really lean on and study so that you know how you’re supposed write.

Sam:

Interesting. What was the most fun part? Just being able to write about something you’re interested in, and write a passage about jazz?

Alex:

That was a lot of fun because I wrote about my hero. Of course, now everybody who takes this exam will know exactly what passage that was. I hope it’s not too hard! But I really think the most fun for me is writing explanations, because you’re able to decode what the question is. You’re able to work in strategy. And we’ve done a ton of that in our explanations. So that’s always the most fun for me.

Sam:

Let’s talk about scoring. How are these MCAT practice exams scored? And how do you make sure that scoring is representative of an AAMC test?

Alex:

Yeah, this is one of the more difficult aspects of creating a representative and useful practice exam for students. Most third-party companies or non-AAAMC companies, will deflate the score. For example, take Chem/Phys where there are 59 questions that you can get. For a lot of third-party exams, if you get 30 questions correct, you’re going to score a 126. Well, for AAMC, if you look at all the different scoring systems, you’re going to need to get more like 40 to 42 questions correct to get that. That’s a huge discrepancy – about 10 questions. We had a lot of discussion as a team about how to navigate this and we decided that we are not compromising on our scoring system. If you get a score on our test, that’s exactly what you would see on a AAMC test. We’ve committed to continuously editing and improving our exam to obtain that scoring goal. That’s one of the big things that separates our exams from others.

Sam:

Interesting. So after taking your practice exam, taking the real AAMC exam on test day seems similar. For instance, if you miss 15 questions on the practice test versus the real exam, you’re going to get the same score no matter what. Is that what you were going for?

Alex:

Yeah, absolutely correct. If you want to score 129 on Chem/Phys, for example, you can write off 9 or 10 questions right off the bat. That plays a ton into strategy. And we want anybody that takes our exams to be able to use the exact same strategy as they’ll use on test day. That’s a major reason why we didn’t deflate the score.

Sam:

Awesome. Another thing I was excited about with the MedSchoolCoach exam platform was the analytics. Could you talk about the metrics you provide students after they take the test?

Alex:

Yeah, absolutely. We have a Score Report where a ton of analytics will be that provide details and performance on several topics in all of the subjects. The Score Report will tell you what to study more of, how much time you are spending on each question, what questions to spend less time on, and perhaps even invest in a tutor on. For instance, if you got 0% of the optics questions right, you should probably go and study optics.

Sam:

We should all study optics.

Alex:

Right, right exactly.

Sam:

It’s the hardest physics, in my opinion. Anyways.

Alex:

I tend to agree. So that’s one thing that’s really going to be helpful, is our Score Report tells you exactly what to do next. It’s really cool, and a lot of time went into it. And of course, that came from feedback from the hundreds and hundreds of students that I and our Director of MCAT, Ken Tao, have received over the years. 

Sam:

Very good. Well, Alex, I appreciate your time. Thanks for joining me. Thanks for talking about your exam. And if anybody is interested in taking the exam, you can go to go.medschoolcoach.com/practice.

For a limited time, #LifeofaMedStudent readers can take the MCAT Practice Exam for free. Use Partner ID code LIFEOFAMEDSTUDENT at checkout!

About the MedSchoolCoach MCAT Practice Exam:

MedSchoolCoach created the most realistic practice exam content available anywhere. By combining years of MCAT expertise and insider AAMC knowledge, they created hundreds of unique passages and questions that replicate the actual MCAT for the most realistic simulation available. They’ve taken the MCAT practice test platforms and recreated the MCAT testing experience in extreme fidelity and coupled it with world-class analytics to help students achieve their dream scores. Take the MCAT Practice Exam today!