Something to Ponder...

[supafield]

August 9th has been marked as a Canadian only MCAT date...

 

If you look at the 1999 examinee data it shows nothing too telling... it just says that Canadian's are on the upper end of scores in the writing sample compared to other geographical locations...

 

Since then, MCAT cut-offs have required Q's and an R! this year at Queens.

Quickly read through the MCAT boards on SDN and you'll see that many American pre-meds could care less if they receive a O or P or less on the WS.... Some actually try but for the most part when you read about a 37 M.... the person would never consider a retake nor would they be too worried about the M because the American admissions boards don't seem to care themselves.

 

These superficial observations would have me believe the Canadian MCAT writers will put in more effort to their writing sample...

 

As far as relying on a curve.... it's tough to find how the AAMC curves... what is seemingly known is that since questions are recycled a writer will be compared to not only people that write on that specific day but people that took those same questions over the last 3 years.... after that the AAMC is very secretive....

 

But if Canadian testers are more proficient with the writing sample, and on August 9th write against no one but Canadian testers does that make it harder to achieve a higher mark? Would the AAMC be comfortable with having a Q/R mean for the writing sample?

 

The good thing is the writing sample is marked by a human.... not subject to statistical scales in the sense that the other sections are... so maybe everyone gets high marks that should... but it kind of makes me wonder whether everyone in August 9th's administration would get the same marks they'd get on the WS writing during another part of the year....

 

As a disclaimer this is based of several assumptions that may be false.

1) I may be wrong in assuming that american premeds lower the scale making it easier for Canadians.

 

2) The complexity of the AAMC statisical analysis may catch this... maybe the writers on the same test date don't carry the emphasis one would think and your prompts will be graded against a more historical scale....

 

Just something that made me wonder however

[Strauss]

The AAMC marks WS holistically, meaning that you don't get marked based on how you do compared to others (as with the other 3 sections), but rather based on the quality of your essay alone.

 

If Canadians are supposedly better writers, then there will be more scores in the Q-T range, not a normalized spread across J-T. Therefore, no need to worry!