Why emphasize verbal?

[Guest ioncannon97]

Hi guys,

 

I was wondering if anyone knew why Queen's places a higher emphasis on verbal reasoning than the sciences (their VR minimum was 10 last year and was 9 for the sciences). Anything about their program that requires this? (I believe this is the highest VR minimum in Canada). I just want to know because I would like to get an idea of each school's program and philosophy in prep for interviews. thanks in advance.

[Guest Ian Wong]

It might be simply that those cutoffs help them arrive at a manageable pool of interview invites.

 

On a different note, I do think that VR is a way of assessing your ability to read and assimilate information. You'll be hit with a ton of material to read during medical school and beyond, and individuals who are very comfortable reading and understanding large volumes of information at a rapid pace tend to do well at handling the academic demands of med school. Whether that always correlates to a higher VR score is up for debate, but that's a different can of worms entirely.

 

Ian

[Guest drews97]

well, who knows what exactly their reasoning is. But, like Ian said, they can only interview about 450 and maybe this is the easiest way to cut the numbers down. Remember, at LEAST this many people that apply do make the verbal cut-off so it obviously isn't unreasonable. I also feel that emphasizing the sciences is meaningless as the actual content is, for the most part, pretty useless to know as a physician. I mean, if someone majors in physics they'll probably get a huge physics score. I think verbal is a way of assessing your ability to deal with novel situations and extract information during times of stress.

[Guest seedstrike]

When i took my MCAT ages ago, there was a rumor/fact going around that there's a study some where out there that shows a direct correlation between how well med students do academically in med school and how well they scored on the VR section. The correlation was only with the VR scores and not with the scores for other sections.

 

But in reality I think that section is emphasized because its so darn hard. It probably breaks the students into a nice normal distribution so the adcom can have an easier time selecting the right number of students for the interview.

[Guest coastal79]

Studying for the MCAT, the verbal took up practically none of my time. I did a practice verbal section the first day, and another a few days before the exam, that's it. While people can obviously do practice questions and improve their verbal scores, I think that there is a limit to how much they can do this. In contrast, the problems I had with the Biological and Physical sections occured, quite simply, because I didn't study the basic information enough. I have no doubt that more time put in would result in a higher score if I were to write the MCAT again. Memorizing facts just takes effort, like getting good grades. My guess as to why the Verbal score is emphasized in some schools in Canada and the US is that it is a purer test of ability, or at least one aspect of intelligence. I'm sure many people would disagree with this point of view.

[Guest JC15]

When I wrote the MCAT, I studied the science sections a lot, but basically I was just memorizing information that I had learned previously. I did not study very much for verbal - basically the only time I even looked at verbal was when I wrote the practice exams. However, I think it is important to score well in all sections because a lot of the science sections were based on comprehension of the passage as well. Having a basic understanding of a scientific passage is probably more important than extracting information from an obscure passage as we had to do in the verbal section.

 

In all honesty, I don't know why the verbal cutoff is higher at Queen's than at other schools. Last year Queen's verbal cutoff was 10, but the writing sample was N. At Western the verbal was 9, but Q for writing. Cutoffs are pretty arbritrary, but since only ~400 people can be interviewed, the line has to be drawn somewhere.

[Guest DonaldKaufman]

I don't think that the percentile scores of each of the 3 MCAT sections perfectly correlates the same with the numeric score. So maybe a 10 in VR is the 80th percentile, but so is a 9 in BS*. In which case, Queens wouldn't really be

'emphasizing' verbal, they'd just be evening out the number of people above each of the cutoffs.

 

DK

 

* Theory is purely hypothetical and has not been investigated by the author, who wrote the MCAT in Aug. 2000, and has no idea where his MCAT info is. Author also remembers the MCAT website being frustrating, and has no intentions of checking it out.

[Guest coastal79]

:lol DK

[Guest Ian Wong]

Floating to the top...

 

Ian