"Experience: that most brutal of teachers. But you learn, my God do you learn." - C.S. Lewis
I have decided to reschedule my exam. Why? Because the fear of the exam overtook me and I realized I could not study any more. I got sick of reading, sick of feeling overwhelmed, and when April 14 came along to reschedule my test date, I decided to take it. My advice to you all is, don't wait until the last minute to take this exam, because you may end up feeling like you're not ready. What you need to do is schedule the exam early and reschedule if you are not ready. ALWAYS WAIT TILL YOU'RE READY. I think it's more important to be ready then to just get this over with. This exam is not the type of exam you should take more than twice, it will hurt you in the long run, so make sure you are ready to take it. I rescheduled for July 16, which is when my nursing program will be running. In case you were wondering, I applied to a 1 year accelerated nursing program, which I am going to go to. Best of luck for me to be able to study for this monster and stay on top of these courses. I think studying in a college library and having no distractions may be for the best, being home with my family has been hard to get quiet and peace.
Also, if those of you are wondering when a good test day would be, I suggest taking the exam in April. That way, you will get your exam scored in a month, by May. Once you have your scores, you can figure out what schools to apply to, which you will need to send an application as soon as June 1. The application will be up on the AAMC website May 1, it is in your best interest to send the application as early as possible. Thus, April is the best month to take this exam. However, if you can figure out what range of scores you will receive, you can take the exam after. I would suggest no later than July to take the exam, since it takes a month to score and send scores to schools.
My studying habits has been mostly taking practice exams. I took AAMC exams 3, 4, 5, 7 and my scores did not improve as much as I would have liked. I want you all to know that I am a terrible test taker, I do not memorize things. My brain does not memorize, so I don't force myself to memorize, I will sit down and draw diagrams and figure out why things are the way they are. My test taking will also show that I do not know how to answer things quickly and know the difference between wrong answers and right answers. Hopefully, my scores will improve with all the practice I've done. I haven't taken a test since March, so things may have changed.
Now, it took me some time to figure out if I wanted to share my scores, and I decided that it would be for the best that I shared. After looking at the Student Doctor Network website, I felt like a failure, seeing people talking about their 36 score, or 40 score, etc. Yes, that is amazing to get a score like that, but that is not the average. On top of that, people don't get those kind of scores without hardwork and a lot of effort. I put a lot of effort on this test, I think I know more about this test than the admissions committees for medical schools, but that doesn't mean I get amazing scores. I want to show you that I have been improving, my scores are getting better and hopefully I will reach my goal of a 30. But like everyone else, I'm getting 20's right now.
My scores:
AAMC Exam 3: 7P 8V 7B = 24
AAMC Exam 4: 7P 7V 7B = 21
AAMC Exam 5: 8P 9V 7B = 24
AAMC Exam 7: 8P 4V 9B = 21
Weird pattern, I know.
Now, as you can see, somehow my verbal fell significantly on AAMC 7, this was a fluke as I was trying something different which was to skim the passage and get to the answer. This obviously didn't work too well. I realized, at the end of the day, I had to read and understand the passage to get to the answers. But, I do show improvement in physical and bio sections, if I continue like this I can reach my goal of 10P 10V 10B = 30.
I switched over to Berkeley review tests because I wanted to save tests AAMC 8, 9, 10, 11 for the week before my tests. I have the paper versions of berkeley review, which from the old version of the exam had 77 questions from the section. So, I answered 52 Physical Science questions, 40 Verbal questions, and 52 Biological Science questions like the real AAMC cbt. Of course, this does not provide a good predictor of my actual score, but it is just good practice. Berkeley review have much harder science questions then the AAMC and easier verbal qestions.
My scores:
MCAT 1: 9P 10V 8B = 27 Easier exam
MCAT 2: 10P 7V 8B = 25 Medium difficulty
MCAT 3: 5P 7B= Very difficult, 10 Verbal 101
MCAT 3 was extremely difficult for me because I had a harder time with the subject matter. Also, instead of taking the berkeley review verbal, I decided to replace it with Verbal 101 tests, which are more similar to the MCAT. After studying AAMC conversion charts, I realized that scores of 40/52 Physical science questions = 10, 30/40 Verbal questions = 10, 40/52 Biological Science questions = 10 more or less. So, since I got 29/40 questions correct on the Verbal 101 questions, this is about a 10 for AAMC. So you can figure out how many questions you can get wrong, mostly you want to miss about 10-12 questions for each section and you should be fine. Best of luck to all of you studying. If anyone would like to ask me questions about any material, AAMC, berkeley review, kaplan, princeton review let me know. Also, I can help you out in finding material for a decent price. I want to help out my fellow MCATers, I know it's a long road.
